Neri Oxman by Noah Kalina (Wikipedia)
Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire investor Bill Ackman and a former M.I.T. professor, is under a cloud of suspicion that she was guilty of plagiarizing some of her work in the past. This is significant because Bill Ackman was at the head of the chorus of people pushing for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay who resigned last week after it was revealed that much of Gay’s work was plagiarized.
However, it should be noted that Bill Ackman did not go after Claudine Gay because of the plagiarism. He did so because of her failure to adequately deal with the students at Harvard who came out in support of the terrorist organization Hamas after its barbaric October 7 massacre of more than 1,200 innocent Israelis. She also had a miserable performance when testifying before the US Congress, failing to condemn the antisemitism proliferating on her school’s campus.
As for Neri Oxman, on Friday Business Insider reported that she allegedly “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.”
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Specifically, Oxman is said to have copied sections of her dissertation that she completed at MIT in 2010.
To that, Neri Oxman said that the allegation deals with a mere four paragraphs out of her 330 page long dissertation.
“For each of the four paragraphs in question, I properly credited the original source’s author(s) with references at the end of each of the subject paragraphs, and in the detailed bibliography end pages of the dissertation,” said Oxman. “In these four paragraphs, however, I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”
After Business Insider contacted Oxman about the allegations, Bill Ackman issued a statement saying, “It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.”
Neri Oxman is an Israeli-American designer and professor known for art and architecture that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase “material ecology” to define her work. She was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976. She studied architecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion University – Israel Institute of Technology. She then moved to the UK to study at the London Institute of Architecture, where she received a master’s degree in design.
Oxman began her career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she received her PhD in computational design. At MIT, she founded the Mediated Matter research group, which focuses on developing new materials and structures by combining design, biology, and engineering.
Oxman’s work has been featured in exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. She has received many awards for her work, including the National Design Award, the Vilcek Award for Design, and MIT’s Collier Medal.
Neri Oxman is a pioneer in the field of material ecology. Her work is helping open up new possibilities for design and architecture. She is creating new materials and structures that can help us build a more sustainable world.
