Wei Jia became a professor at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in August of 2008, after 10 years working at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is a specialist in metabolomics, meaning that he looks at the chemical byproducts, or metabolites, of cells, tissues and living things. He’s done chemical analyses of the blood of colorectal cancer patients, for example, and of the amniotic fluid of malnourished pregnant rats.

Just a month after Jia moved to the U.S., he and the rest of the world heard about a tragedy in his native country. Thousands of babies in China were sick with kidney stones and several had died after drinking formula laced with a ubiquitous and cheap industrial