An Israeli scientist, Dr. Shay Laps, has filed a federal lawsuit against Stanford University, accusing the institution of creating a hostile work environment and engaging in a campaign of retaliation and false allegations against him based on his Jewish identity. According to the lawsuit, Laps, an Israeli chemist who earned his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, joined Stanford University with the hope of advancing his research into peptides and proteins under the mentorship of Dr. Danny Chou, a lab leader who had shown interest in his earlier work and promised multiple years of support in his lab. However, the lawsuit claims that Laps was met with overt hostility from the moment he arrived at the university, with no apparent explanation.
The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California by the Louis D. Brandeis Center and Cohen Williams, alleges that Laps was greeted with outright hostility from the moment he stepped foot in the lab, with no apparent explanation. A research professional in the lab allegedly told Dr. Laps never to speak to her on his first day joining the team, and the suit states that his colleagues were aware of his Jewish identity before he joined. The hostility allegedly escalated to the point where the lab materials Laps ordered were never delivered on time, despite his colleagues receiving their requested materials in a timely manner. When Dr. Laps attempted to address a particular holdup, she allegedly told him to contact another colleague currently hospitalized – a gesture that Laps interpreted as an attempt to get him to leave.
The researcher’s campaign of hostility allegedly went so far that the lab materials Laps ordered were never delivered on time, even though his colleagues all received requested materials in a timely manner. When Dr. Laps attempted to address a particular holdup, she allegedly told him to contact another colleague who was currently hospitalized – a gesture which Laps interpreted as a call for him to get lost. She also allegedly fabricated results from one of his experiments and tried to trick him into destroying the evidence, the lawsuit claimed.
Laps was confused as to why the lab staffer was so overtly hostile towards him and no one else in the lab, but became suspicious that it was due to his Israeli identity when he discovered that she associated with many radical anti-Israel activists on campus. The lawsuit also cites a 2024 report commissioned by Stanford University itself, which detailed a culture of antisemitism on campus, reportedly exacerbated after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The report included accounts of Jewish students being asked to stand in a corner and labeled as