Martin Nowak

Harvard University suspended Nowak on May 1, 2020 because of his affiliation with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A report commissioned by the university found that while Nowak had not accepted any gifts from Epstein following Epstein’s conviction in 2008, Nowak allowed Epstein ongoing access to visit the university and maintain an office and phone line.

In 2011, Nowak’s book Supercooperators: The Mathematics of Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour (Or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) was published, co-authored with Roger Highfield.

Nowak was co-director with Sarah Coakley of the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation project at Harvard University, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. He is also a member of the Board of Advisers of the Templeton Foundation. In a lecture given at Harvard in March 2007 called "Evolution and Christianity", Nowak, a Roman Catholic, argued that "Science and religion are two essential components in the search for truth. Denying either is a barren approach."

In a paper featured on the front cover of Nature in 2007, Nowak and colleagues demonstrated that the transition of irregular verbs to regular verbs in English over time obeys a simple inverse-square law, thus providing one of the first quantitative laws in the evolution of language.

In a paper in Science in 2006, Nowak enunciated and unified the mathematical rules for the five understood bases of the evolution of cooperation (kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection). Nowak suggests that evolution is constructive because of cooperation, and that we might add “natural cooperation” as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection.

Nowak works on the dynamics of infectious diseases, cancer genetics, the evolution of cooperation and human language. His first book, Virus Dynamics (written with Robert May) was published by Oxford University Press, 2000. Nowak is a corresponding member of the Austrian academy of sciences. He won the Weldon Memorial Prize, the Albert Wander Prize, the Akira Okubo Prize, the David Starr Jordan Prize and the Henry Dale Prize. His 2006 book Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life was published in 2006 to critical acclaim and won the Association of American Publishers R.R. Hawkins Award for the Outstanding Professional, Reference or Scholarly Work of 2006.

In 1990, Nowak and Robert May proposed a mathematical model which explained the puzzling delay between HIV infection and AIDS in terms of the evolution of different strains of the virus during individual infections, to the point where the genetic diversity of the virus reaches a threshold whereby the immune system can no longer control it. This detailed quantitative approach depended on assumptions about the biology of HIV which were subsequently confirmed by experiment.

Nowak studied biochemistry and mathematics at the University of Vienna, and earned his Ph.D. in 1989, working with Peter Schuster on quasi-species theory and with Karl Sigmund on evolution of cooperation.

In 1989, he moved to the University of Oxford as an Erwin Schrödinger postdoctoral Scholar to work with Robert May, becoming Head of Mathematical Biology in 1995 and Professor of Mathematical Biology in 1997. In 1998 he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study to establish the first program in Theoretical Biology there. In 2003, Nowak was recruited to Harvard University as Professor of Mathematics and Biology. He is Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics which was funded with a $30-million pledge by Jeffrey Epstein and his foundation, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation, a friend of Nowak who had supported his work in the past.

Martin Andreas Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is a Professor of Biology and Mathematics at Harvard University.