Who is Martin Nowak? Harvard prof punished for giving Jeffrey Epstein unrestricted access to campus for donations
A professor at Harvard University was recently sanctioned for his alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein, which included granting the convicted sex offender unrestricted access to the campus.
Martin Nowak, a biology and mathematics professor at the university, was placed on administrative leave last year over the scandal. However, he will soon resume teaching at the Ivy League institution once again until his privileges are officially revoked.
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Nowak's connections to Epstein were detailed in a Harvard 2020 review. It noted that between 1998 and 2008, the pedophile financier had made donations of $6.5 million to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which was run by Nowak. This was just part of the $9.1 million in total gifts that Epstein donated to the university during that period, per the report.
The sizeable donations led to Epstein getting his own space in the PED office, including key codes and a visitor card that allowed him unrestricted access to the building. An investigation later found the convicted sex offender had visited the campus over 40 times between 2010 and 2018.
The perks barely stopped there. It later emerged that Nowak's team had also created a page about Epstein online as “part of a larger effort to rehabilitate his image” after his 2018 sex crime conviction. The page was only taken down after one of Epstein's alleged victims complained to the university.
The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics will be shut down and Nowak will not be allowed to supervise new students or advise undergrads for a period of two years, Harvard has announced. "While I have always been grateful to anyone who would support my research, I regret the connection I was part of fostering between Harvard and Jeffrey Epstein and the hurt that it has caused," Nowak said in a statement on Friday. "I will take the lessons from this time with me as I move forward."
Meanwhile, Dean for Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Claudine Gay said she believed the sanctions were “proportionate to the severity of the behavior observed" and that Nowak may regain his privileges after a review in two years.
Epstein died in his jail cell under mysterious circumstances while awaiting trial on sex crime charges in 2019. Following his conviction in 2008, the hedge fund honcho is said to have visited the campus more than 40 times, including as recently as 2018. Investigators said the visits stopped after other researchers at the university complained about Epstein's presence.
The Harvard 2020 review, however, cleared its senior leaders of any wrongdoing as they had "acted appropriately in their dealings with Epstein," per NBC News. And while most of the funds from Epstein had been exhausted by last year, the school vowed to donate a remaining $200,000 to groups that support victims of sex trafficking and assault.
Having said that, a number of other universities have faced scrutiny over their alleged ties to Epstein, including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joi Ito, the former director of MIT's Media Lab, resigned in 2019 amid outrage over his alleged financial connections to Epstein. Ito later issued a public apology and vowed to raise money for victims of trafficking.