| By Julian J. Giordano
A federal judge allowed most of a whistleblower lawsuit against Harvard to proceed Tuesday, letting two claims advance in a case accusing the University and a Harvard Catalyst principal investigator of misusing National Institutes of Health grant funding.
The suit, filed by David S. Zielinski, the former executive director of Harvard Catalyst — formally the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center — alleges that the University and the center’s founder, Lee M. Nadler, collected $275 million in NIH grants while abandoning or repurposing promised research work in violation of the False Claims Act.
The lawsuit was filed in March 2024 and remained under seal while the Department of Justice reviewed the allegations until November 2025.
U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun rejected most of the University’s motion to dismiss in his 28-page order, tossing one count of “reverse false claims” while allowing two claims alleging false claims and false records to advance.
At the motion-to-dismiss stage, Joun did not rule on the truth of Zielinski’s allegations, only that the surviving claims were sufficiently pleaded to proceed. Harvard has 14 days to answer the two surviving counts.
The NIH awards to the center are cooperative agreements, a funding mechanism under which NIH “expects to be substantially involved in carrying out the project.”
The University had argued that the court should “be skeptical” that the NIH “somehow missed that two-thirds of the...
| By Julian J. Giordano A federal judge allowed most of a whistleblower lawsuit against Harvard to proceed Tuesday, letting two claims advance in a case accusing the University and a Harvard Catal...