A leading developmental biologist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) this spring resumed teaching and supervising students, including undergraduates, ending a 3-month suspension without pay imposed after the school found he had likely engaged in persistent, pervasive sexual harassment. A wide-ranging university investigation of Bruce Blumberg that concluded in April 2023 supported a graduate student’s allegations of harassment that culminated in her abruptly leaving his lab and the university. An earlier sexual harassment probe of the prominent researcher had documented other instances of inappropriate conduct.
Blumberg has denied all the claims. UCI says it promptly and appropriately investigated and disciplined him, and is monitoring his behavior now that he is back on campus.
But UCI faculty and outside experts on sexual harassment in science, as well as witnesses who were interviewed for the latest UCI probe, expressed frustration and anger over Blumberg’s short-lived punishment.
His suspension and the conditions of his return are “an absolute joke,” says one former Blumberg postdoc who asked not to be identified for fear of career damage. “Who wants their young daughter or son to be in his lab?”
Although he agreed to a suspension and certain conditions for reinstatement, including his trainees meeting privately each quarter with the department chair to discuss any concerns about his behavior, Blumberg told Science that the recent UCI probe was “biased and extremely flawed” and that the school’s investigator led witnesses and ignored exculpatory evidence. “The mischaracterization of me and my relationship to students and lab members is deeply offensive, profoundly hurtful, [and] completely inconsistent with the facts,” he says.
Blumberg’s lawyer, Robert Feltoon, added: “The newsworthy story here is about the unconscionable flaws in how the university conducted this scorched earth investigation.”
The outcome of the case stands in stark contrast to another at UCI: the resignation under pressure of the late evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala and the removal of his name from two campus buildings. That followed a UCI investigation that concluded in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, which found the scientist had engaged in sexual harassment.
“It’s a travesty … that one can still have faculty members sexually harassing students, and have there be very few consequences,” says Carol Greider, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who reviewed the UCI investigative report and the terms of Blumberg’s discipline; both were obtained by Science through a public records request. Greider served on a working group that 5 years ago recommended measures for preventing sexual harassment to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “It’s as if all the work we did on the NIH working group was completely for nothing,” she says.
Blumberg, 70, has been at UCI since 1998. His work has shown how environmental chemical exposures can change fat metabolism and cause obesity across generations; he described the first chemical in a class he and others dubbed “obesogens.”
According to UCI’s investigative report last year, Blumberg was required to meet with administrators in 2013 when rumors of a consensual relationship with a student surfaced. Blumberg flatly denies having an affair, and during the recent probe, the former student told the investigator the relationship was professional.
The report also states that after a student complained in 2019, a UCI investigation found inappropriate language and behavior from Blumberg but stopped short of finding sexual harassment.
Then in 2022, UCI’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity conducted an 11-month probe of Blumberg when a second-year graduate student complained of sexual harassment after returning from a conference trip to Spain with him that she called “an absolute nightmare.” According to the report, she estimated that he made 50 sexual comments toward her in 4 days.
She also told the UCI investigator that in the months before the trip, Blumberg sat very close to her in the lab, asked her about her sex life, asked her to work out with him, called her “babe,” monitored her whereabouts, and repeatedly requested rides home from her. (Blumberg denied or offered different interpretations of these events.)
Blumberg invited the student to accompany him to a conference in Elche, Spain. En route, according to the report, he showed her a photo of a building in Barcelona that he said “looked like a dildo.” They stopped for 3 days in Barcelona, where the student said he pressured her to drink alcohol and to stay out when, exhausted, she wanted to return to the hotel where he had booked them neighboring rooms. He suggested visits to a sex store and an erotic museum, the student reported. She also told UCI that he laughed at her discomfort when he joked over a meal, “I can give you some meat.”
The graduate student and another person with her on the trip, who verified her account to UCI according to the report, moved to another hotel late at night while Blumberg was at a restaurant, then returned to the United States before the conference started. “I was scared, so far from home, and fleeing in a country I’ve never been to and don’t speak the language,” the student told the investigator. Upon her return, she immediately cleaned out her desk and left the university.
During the probe, Blumberg told the investigator that the student had laughed when he described the “dildo building.” He denied making the “give you some meat” comment and suggesting visits to a sex store or an erotic museum, saying rather that he pointed them out in disgust. He said he was surprised when she left Spain, and it was “an even bigger shock” to find she had vacated the lab.
Blumberg provided the investigator with pretrip texts and emails he had exchanged with the graduate student in which she called him “a great professor” and wrote “I’m the happiest person alive right now!” Blumberg also contended that the graduate student lied when she told the investigator in May 2022 that he moved her seat assignment on the plane next to his against her wishes. He provided a March 2022 text exchange regarding preconference time he booked in Barcelona. She wrote: “Woohoo an extra day to explore. … Yayyy.” He responded “I take care of you, girl. Looking for hotel in Barcelona now.” And she replied “You’re the best! We can sit together on the plane, right?”
Blumberg also noted that the UCI investigator interviewed the student in the presence of another witness—her other companion on the trip—a breach of policy UCI has acknowledged. And he provided Science with several signed statements from former students calling him an excellent mentor and teacher.
The investigator interviewed 34 witnesses and produced a 129-page investigative report that concluded the student was more credible than Blumberg and that it was “more likely than not” that Blumberg had harassed the student. In July, developmental neuroscientist Diane O’Dowd, then the university’s vice provost for academic personnel, placed Blumberg on involuntary leave with pay, an interim measure that can be taken while discipline is being determined.
One week after O’Dowd’s decision, Blumberg challenged her move in a grievance filed with the Academic Senate, a faculty body that helps govern the university. In August, a Senate committee upheld O’Dowd’s decision. But in September, UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman overruled O’Dowd and the committee, allowing Blumberg to work remotely with full faculty privileges until his discipline was decided.
UCI said in a statement that Gillman intervened after determining Blumberg did not pose an “immediate and serious harm to the University community,” as the UCI Code of Conduct requires to impose involuntary leave. Requiring Blumberg to work remotely “addressed the safety concerns of the university,” the statement said. It added that Gillman also considered the fact that in the 14 months after the student filed her complaint in May 2022, “there were no additional reports against [Blumberg.]”
“The chancellor’s decision was irresponsible,” says Ann Olivarius, a lawyer who has represented both complainants and accused professors in sexual harassment cases in science. “He has got a history here of misconduct,” she says of Blumberg. “He is a danger.”
In December 2023, Blumberg agreed to the suspension without pay for one academic quarter, and to subsequent restrictions on his activities. His lawyer says he did so in the interest of the survival of his lab and to limit the impacts on its members as well as on a collaborator at a different institution.
During a 5-year probation period that began in late March, Blumberg may not host high school interns in the lab; travel to conferences with students; drink or offer alcohol at lab events; socialize independently with students or lab members; follow them on social media; or discuss his, or their, personal lives with them. He was also required to attend 2 hours of sexual harassment training. His department chair will meet privately with each of Blumberg’s advisees each quarter “to check in and provide them with a specific space to raise any concerns,” UCI said in its statement.
The restrictions—which his lawyer described as “relatively minor”—do not prohibit Blumberg from holding closed-door office hours with undergrads, and they allow him, with preapproval, to attend conferences with trainees. As a result, “I just cannot see how these actions will truly and 100% protect UCI students against his future attempts at sexual harassment,” says one UCI life scientist who declined to be identified for fear of
career repercussions.
The outcome “is disappointing and really discouraging for women,” adds a former Blumberg graduate student who also fears career damage if she were named. Blumberg’s behavior, including the use of inappropriate language, “sadly just became normal,” she says. “We [had to] deal with it and survive and graduate and get out of there.”
Olivarius notes that the restrictions don’t require new students and trainees coming into the lab to be told about the sexual harassment finding. “The guy has got a history. It should be publicized. That’s how you stop the behavior. Otherwise, the discipline doesn’t seem to amount to very much.”
Blumberg is a principal investigator on two NIH grants that awarded $1.1 million, some of which went to the lab of his collaborator, in the 12 months ending on 30 June. Under NIH rules, UCI was required to notify NIH’s Office of Extramural Research of the finding and discipline against Blumberg. NIH declined to comment last week when asked whether it had removed Blumberg from any grants—an option for the agency when it learns of harassment case outcomes.
