Martin Nowak

Martin A. Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is an Austrian-born mathematical biologist at Harvard University who directed the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) from its founding in 2003. The program was established with help from a $6.5 million gift from Jeffrey Epstein, the largest single donation Epstein made to Harvard, and a 2020 university report found that Nowak gave Epstein an office and campus access used for more than forty visits after Epstein's 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Harvard sanctioned Nowak in 2021.¹²

Mathematical Biology at Harvard

Nowak trained in biochemistry and mathematics at the University of Vienna before working at the University of Oxford and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He joined Harvard in 2003 as professor of mathematics and biology and became the founding director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which applied mathematical models to evolution, cooperation, cancer, and the dynamics of infectious disease. His books include Evolutionary Dynamics (Harvard University Press, 2006) and SuperCooperators (Free Press, 2011).³¹

Nowak's central research concerns the evolution of cooperation, set out in his 2006 Science paper "Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation," which catalogued kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection as the mechanisms by which natural selection can favor cooperative behavior. In a 2010 Nature paper, "The Evolution of Eusociality," Nowak with Corina Tarnita and the biologist E. O. Wilson challenged the dominance of inclusive-fitness theory, prompting a rebuttal signed by more than 130 biologists.⁸⁹

The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was created in 2003 under Harvard President Lawrence Summers following a proposal that, according to Harvard's later review, originated with Epstein and the mathematician Benedict Gross. Epstein told Vanity Fair that he had been reluctant to attach his name to the program and that Summers persuaded him to fund it. The program operated out of an office suite at One Brattle Square in Harvard Square rather than on the main campus.²⁴

Epstein's Donations and Campus Access

A review of Harvard's ties to Epstein, commissioned by President Lawrence Bacow in September 2019 and released on May 1, 2020, found that Epstein gave Harvard $9,179,000 across 22 gifts between 1998 and 2008, of which the $6.5 million for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics in 2003 was the largest. The review was conducted by the Office of the General Counsel under Diane Lopez with the law firm Foley Hoag, drew on more than 250,000 pages of documents, and interviewed over forty people. It found that Harvard stopped accepting Epstein gifts after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, with the decision to halt gifts made under President Drew Faust between 2007 and 2008, though Epstein gave $736,000 after his 2006 arrest but before the conviction.²⁵

Epstein held a formal Harvard appointment as a visiting fellow in the psychology department for the 2005 to 2006 academic year, secured through department chair Stephen Kosslyn despite Epstein's lacking the doctoral degree the position normally required; Epstein reapplied for 2006 to 2007 but withdrew after his September 2006 arrest. The report found that Epstein retained a dedicated office at PED, identified as Office 610 and known internally as "Jeffrey's Office," to which he brought his own rug and hung his own photographs, with keycard and passcode access and a Harvard telephone line that remained until 2017.²⁵

The report found that Epstein visited the program more than forty times between 2010 and 2018, including six visits in 2018, often accompanied by young women in their twenties described as assistants. It found that Nowak approved posting on the PED website in 2014 a webpage featuring Epstein's photograph, biography, and charitable links under a tab labeled "Friends," on which Epstein was the only entry, and that the review described the program's account of Epstein's support as "flattering and false." Summers, former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Henry Rosovsky, and law professor Alan Dershowitz were among those recorded as attending PED events.²⁶

Sanctions and Aftermath

On March 26, 2021, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Claudine Gay announced that Nowak had violated several university policies and imposed sanctions: he was barred for two years from serving as principal investigator on new grants, prohibited for two years from taking on new undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral advisees, and allowed to continue teaching undergraduate courses. Harvard announced that the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics would be closed and that Nowak's research would move into the mathematics department. Nowak had been placed on paid administrative leave in May 2020.¹⁶

Harvard reported that it had identified $200,937 in unspent Epstein funds, which it pledged to direct to organizations supporting victims of human trafficking, and stated it would not accept future gifts from Epstein or his estate. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences lifted the sanctions in 2023, restoring Nowak's research and advising privileges in March of that year.²⁷

The 2026 Files and Renewed Leave

In February 2026 the journal Nature reported, drawing on U.S. Department of Justice files, that Epstein's involvement with Nowak's work ran deeper than the 2020 review had described, including that Epstein reviewed page proofs of the 2010 eusociality paper and gave advice on responding to its critics. Nowak's name appears more than 8,000 times in the released files. Nature also reported that in 2009 Epstein routed scholarship money through Corina Tarnita, then Nowak's PhD student, to two young women studying mathematics at the University of Iași in Romania; Tarnita, by then at Princeton University, told Nature the payments were legitimate scholarships and that she wished she had never known Epstein.¹⁰¹¹

A March 10, 2014 email chain published from the files showed Nowak writing to Epstein that "our spy was captured after completing her mission," to which Epstein replied "did you torture her." Nowak later said on his website that the line came from the video game Civilization II, where the response signals a successful operation. The files also showed that an Epstein assistant arranged 2014 travel for Nowak and a female Harvard graduate student to Epstein's Caribbean island.¹²¹¹

On February 25, 2026, Harvard placed Nowak on paid administrative leave a second time, with FAS Dean Hopi Hoekstra citing new information from the released Department of Justice documents. In April 2026 Nowak resigned from the Austrian Academy of Sciences amid the renewed scrutiny.⁷¹³