Martin Nowak

Martin Nowak is an Austrian-born mathematician and biologist, born in Vienna on 7 April 1965, who is professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. He is known for his work on evolutionary dynamics, including evolutionary game theory, the evolution of cooperation, virus dynamics, cancer, infectious disease and the evolution of language. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he earned a doctorate in biochemistry and mathematics in 1989, collaborating with Peter Schuster on quasispecies theory and with Karl Sigmund on the evolution of cooperation. After postdoctoral work with Robert May at the University of Oxford, where he became professor of mathematical biology in 1997, he headed the Program in Theoretical Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1998 and moved to Harvard in 2003. At Oxford he helped to establish virus dynamics and spatial games, which later became evolutionary graph theory. He has written books on evolutionary dynamics, the evolution of cooperation and religion, and he is a noted critic of inclusive fitness theory, on which he published a 2010 paper with Corina Tarnita and E. O. Wilson. His relationship with the financier Jeffrey Epstein led Harvard to restrict his supervision of undergraduate research in 2021 and to place him on administrative leave in February 2026.