Axel Meyer’s pampered bottom

A German professor of evolutionary biology bullied his students and lab members. For decades. Everyone knew. He even advertised his bullying in German newspapers, along with his misogynous, homophobic and racist views, which this biologist insisted were all based on solid science. The university occasionally apologised for his behaviour, and otherwise let him continue. Because despite all that was known, this professor remained supported by the highest societal elites and is showered with awards, titles and grant money.

It is not about one toxic white man. It is about German academia which admires entitled bullies like Axel Meyer.

In Germany, media usually reports about academic abusers without naming them, simply not to get sued. See for example my own follow-up coverage of sexual harassment and bullying at University of Cologne, where professors Sascha Topolinski and Brunhilde Wirth seem to be involved. The former immediately sent a lawyer to prevent my reporting. The latter is under investigation, which the university decided to sabotage (read October 2025 Shorts).

It seems, sabotaging their own investigations is what universities often do to avoid having to sanction or even sack a bully professor.

In May 2025, Nature published an article, about bullying in German universities. It started with:

“At one of Germany’s top-funded universities, a high-profile biology researcher has bullied his large group of junior staff, targeting women and international students, for decades. In interviews with Nature’s careers team, 14 current and former laboratory members detail what they describe as endless demands for unrealistic levels of research productivity. If those demands aren’t met, they allege, he withholds letters of recommendation and approval of time off work. If displeased, he denies funding or sends disparaging e-mails to researchers’ potential employers. Verbal abuse is commonplace. Women report being warned not to get pregnant while a member of his lab.

The university is aware of his behaviour. Yet, no investigation has been conducted nor any sanctions imposed because the complainants requested anonymity, fearing retribution —
anonymity that cannot be upheld in an investigation owing to German labour law.”

This bully is Axel Meyer, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at University of Konstanz since 1997, one of most cited researchers in his field worldwide, Fellow of Leopoldina Academy, Fellow of European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Fellow of Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Fellow of Academia Europaea, Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Member of Hector Fellow Academy. EMBO Member, board member of the Giordano-Bruno-Foundation, laureate of Leopoldina’s Carus Medal and other prestigious awards.

I know it for sure because the current Rector of the University of Konstanz confirmed this to me.

And guess what, all these academy fellowships, prizes, board memberships and fat research grants happened AFTER Meyer was found guilty of research misconduct for bullying. Nature reported in 2004 (not a typo, indeed 22 years ago) that sixteen Meyer’s lab members blew the whistle in May 2003:

“In a final bid to get their voices heard, the group last spring submitted a joint complaint about their alleged mistreatment in a lab at the University of Konstanz. An internal investigation by the university has now supported some of their grievances.

The committee charged with investigating the researchers’ claims finished its report on 24 May. It found that the lab’s head, evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer, worked his team too hard, and that “occasionally insufficient” support “led to frustration or overtaxing” of the lab’s junior members.

The committee’s report stresses that the junior researchers made no accusations of data manipulation. But it states that some of the complaints hinted at scientific misconduct. The report, which was leaked to media outlets by one of the complainants, adds that Meyer’s management style “could be detrimental”to the scientific activity of his group.”

Meyer was specifically found guilty of misconduct in four cases, for “advertising positions for which independence of research was promised but not delivered, and for which there was no specific budget“, for demanding “honorary authorship on papers” and for plagiarising ““almost word for word” a grant proposal designed and written by a foreign scientist“,

The whistleblowers outed themselves in a letter to Nature from September 2024: Edward Málaga-Trillo, Gabriele Gerlach, Julia Day, Zoltán Ivics, Zsuzsanna Izsvák, Eric Rivera-Milla,
Simona Santini and Jens Seckinger. They objected to Nature‘s implying that it was “a conflict largely over lab conditions and management style“:

“In fact, Axel Meyer was declared guilty of scientific misconduct on eight out of a sample of 13 counts documented by an independent university commission, who followed criteria set by the main German scientific bodies. It is time we recognized that scientific misconduct is not only about data manipulation. Of the eight confirmed allegations, the four that concern grant plagiarism and authorship manipulation should be taken particularly seriously by the scientific community. The original complaint presented to the commission does more than “hint” at scientific misconduct — it also records damage to junior researchers’ career prospects.”

But then, Meyer’s “former students, postdocs and scientific collaborators” wrote to Nature to protest that those complaints were ever accepted for investigation, because their “own experiences of working in or collaborating with Axel Meyer’s lab have been far more positive“.

In the following years, Meyer became multiple Academician and was showered with money and power. In 2011, he received the ERC Advanced Grant of €2.5 million, in the same year he became a Hector Fellow (a program sponsored by Hans-Werner Hector, the billionaire co-founder of SAP), which earned him next to personnel funds and a personal cash award of €150,000, while the University of Konstanz received from Hector €3 million. No wonder they allowed the bully to do as he pleases. Meyer also received massive research funding from the German Research Council DFG (some of it still ongoing), he also became “Scout” for the Henriette Herz Scouting Programme, where he decided about postdoctoral grants.

And no, Meyer didn’t stop bullying his lab members, he continued as before. You read the above Nature reporting from 2025. And there was more than bullying.

In April 2015, Meyer published a bizarre piece in the German national newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), where he, without any proof or evidence, accused his students of having broken into his office to steal the exam papers, and: “It wasn’t the first time“. And then he started with this (translated):

“Our students are also spoiled in other ways, because not only do they not pay any tuition fees, but they also easily receive student loans, scholarships and other grants and discounts. In every respect, their behinds are pampered and any laziness and incompetence are forgiven with a lot of care and understanding. Money isn’t really a problem for most children of helicopter parents.”

The then-rector of University of Konstanz, Ulrich Rüdiger, apologised for Meyer’s behaviour with a public statement, translated:

“I find several passages contained in this text to be defamatory and offensive and I strongly condemn them. As Rector of the University of Konstanz, I personally apologize for these statements made by a university member.

The students and employees, not only at the University of Konstanz, but at all universities, do not deserve to be described in this way and in such a generalized way because of their way of working and their self-image.

I will continue to pursue this process and have arranged to examine possible consequences for Mr. Meyer.”

This 2015 statement was for some reason deleted by the university a year or so later.

Back in 2015, I commented about Meyer’s FAZ rant in Laborjournal, where I also referenced another opinion piece of his in Wirtschaftswoche, which unfortunately now completely disappeared from the internet. Anyway, there Meyer demanded a “70 to 80 hour week” from PhD students.

Meyer often said horrible things in public, in an unapologetically bare-faced homophobe, sexist and racist manner, which would be bad enough was this dude not professor for evolution, molecular biology and genetics, science fields which has long debunked all his unsavoury views as totally unfounded. Instead, this professor of evolution sticks to long-debunked “race” and gender pseudoscience, and his own alternative facts of biology and genetics.

Here is Meyer on women, in Deutschlandfunk in 2017:

“Women also want strong men who are rich and can provide security. Why do old, gray men drive around in Porsches? Because young women respond to men like that. And men get the sex that they pay for with their Porsche.”

I wonder what kind of car Meyer drives. In his openly sexist book “Adams Apfel und Evas Erbe” from 2015, Meyer also took side of the racist politician Thilo Sarrazin who argued against Muslim migration in his book “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab” with the alleged inheritability of alleged low intelligence of these ethnic groups. Meyer wrote that in Sarrazin’s book “the current state of knowledge about the genetic basis of intelligence was presented in a way that was largely scientifically correct.”

In 2019, Meyer once again outed himself as a racist, in another FAZ article defending the Harvard geneticist David Reich from criticism. Meyer’s own words translated:

“But the uncomfortable truth, which Reich also addresses, is that socially constructed racial classifications often correspond to genetic differences.
According to this view, ‘races’ are not merely a cultural construct, but also reflect measurable genetic differences that may be responsible for physiological and cognitive differences.”

If Meyer says those horrid things in German national media, imagine what he says to his lab members in private.

Maybe Meyer isn’t really such a great scholar? Ever since James Watson I wonder why we worship as geniuses those biologists who actually deny established science facts to spout racism, sexism and homophobia.

But now I wonder what exactly the billionaire Hans-Werner Hector meant when he said about Meyer while awarding him the Hector Science Prize in 2012:

“Making the initially unthinkable thinkable and then transforming it through results into reality is what sets you apart.”

A racist, sexist, homophobe bully should never be allowed to teach or supervise students, and I am not sure one can learn much about evolution from such an expert anyway. The University of Konstanz however failed to protect their students.

I exchanged many emails with the current Rector of the University of Konstanz, Katharina Holziger. She eventually gave me this statement in English to be quoted:

“For the initiation of disciplinary proceedings against researchers at the University of Konstanz, German law requires that complainants step out of their anonymity: Accused persons must be informed of the specific allegations, and they have the right to inspect the files in order to be able to defend themselves against the allegations. However, if complainants insist on remaining anonymous, it is unfortunately not possible for the university to initiate disciplinary proceedings.

The University of Konstanz actively pursues the review and clarification of all submitted complaints and will initiate proceedings provided that the complainants disclose their names and the legal requirements are met.”

To avoid the confusion: the university, just like the Nature journalist, knew the identity of these victims. They are currently anonymous only to Meyer, at least in the sense that he legally can’t say for sure it was them.

Which is where the problem lies. Meyer is quite wealthy and he does not shy from deploying lawyers (as we read in 2004). These 14 current victims were obviously afraid that he would retaliate, even sue them for defamation – a legal fight they couldn’t be able to afford due to their financial and mental health situation, but Meyer easily could, with pleasure even.

I asked Rector Holzinger what the university did to protect these victims from retaliation and in particular from such frivolous lawsuits. She never answered this question.

Holzinger told me other things which she didn’t want quoted. But I wish to quote them anyway. She told me that her university’s “legal team had reviewed each case and each complaint“, and determined that nothing could be done from legal point because of the statute of limitation and because only one victim was still employed at University of Konstanz, yet “requirements for further legal action were not met in this case“. The rector also mentioned:

“One person contacted the [investigative commission for scientific misconduct] under their name; Here we carried out a procedure and made a decision that the person concerned accepted.“

Why does this sound like the university bullied a whistleblower to drop the charges against Meyer in return for something, maybe a successful graduation or a good letter of reference?

The rector also said that “legal regulations, including labour law, sometimes prevent consistent action against abuse of power.” That is indeed true, it is near impossible to sack a German professor, certainly not for bullying, but it happens sometimes for sexual harassment, see Coda below. But still – universities are certainly not helpless, every day they make decisions on how to get rid of certain undesired people who can’t be sacked outright via employment law. There are things University of Konstanz could have easily done after those misconduct findings from 2004, in order to push Meyer to resign on his own volition and to go somewhere far away, like China (where another German bully, Bernhard Hommel, ended up).

Things like:

• Ban Meyer from teaching students and from supervising PhD students, at least in person
• Remove Meyer’s access to university’s lab space
• Deny Meyer institutional support for external grant applications

But none of that was done, even though Holzinger protested this assumption of mine. Well, I can easily prove that her university did the opposite, they have been in fact pampering Meyer’s behind. What is my proof? All those fancy fellowships and awards, honours and external grants Meyer received, and all these research papers of his his university publicly celebrated.

Here is the most recent university press release, from February 2026, about Meyer’s paper Zdral et al 2025. Here another press release, from August 2025, Meyer is quoted throughout most of the text because he coauthored a paper with his Chinese friends in PNAS (Du et al 2025). Again, a Meyer eulogy in July 2025, because he and his two Chinese mentees published in Science Advances (Tian et al 2025). And so on.

The rector Holzinger told me one thing, which I absolutely must repeat here:

“In the scientific field, abuse of power is sometimes accompanied by scientific misconduct.“

I only disagree about “sometimes”. Always. Lab members who are afraid of their boss will eventually deliver the exact scientific results he wanted. They will resort to anything, up to outright data fabrication. Bullying works best on foreign lab members who don’t speak German, who come from authoritarian-ruled states, and who depend on a visa.

Meyer’s lab currently consists of two assistant professors (Joost Woltering and Nina Hafer-Hahmann), three Chinese postdocs and two PhD students, one of them Chinese. The bully is going to turn 65 this year, by law he should retire in the year 2027 the latest, unless extended as senior professor. Maybe the university will do that, maybe not – Meyer has no new research grants, his current DFG funding ends in 2026.

Rector Holzinger couldn’t tell me if Meyer will be allowed to stay on after he reaches retirement age – personal data protection. She also refused to tell me whether there are any lab openings in Meyer’s lab, this information must also be private and confidential. Oh well. Whenever Meyer will retire, it will be a huge party, everyone will celebrate him.

Meyer’s connections into the highest ranks of German academia, politics, industry, media and society are still working. Not despite, but because of his vile views.

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Coda

A similar situation already happened at the University of Kassel, with another professor of evolutionary biology who seems to be a friend of Meyer’s: Ulrich Kutschera. This one also publicly kept saying the most horrible things about women and especially about LGBTQ people, he is additionally an unhinged climate change denialist (see Wikipedia). In 2021, a German court took his side that, as a rich German professor with expensive lawyers, Kutschera was entitled to publicly say that homosexual marriage amounts to “government-sanctioned pedophilia” and “extensive child abuse“. The University of Kassel could only wait till Kutschera reached his retirement age of 66, and sent him off in 2021 to enjoy his big fat pension. He now works for the far-right party AfD, specifically their Desiderius-Erasmus-Foundation.

Max Planck Bullies

Bullying as good as never leads to dismissal in Germany. The Nature article mentions (without naming) the empathy researcher Tanja Singer, and former director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, who was very ironically exposed as a bully in a Science article in 2018. Like Meyer, Singer also didn’t allow her female subordinates to get pregnant. One victim was quoted: “Whenever anyone had a meeting with her there was at least an even chance they would come out in tears“. In 2021, Singer was suspended for a year, but otherwise found innocent of any sanctionable misconduct. She was however asked to leave the Leipzig institute for a comfy job in Berlin, where a special institute was set up just for her by the Max Planck Society – “CovSocial”, to study mental health during COVID-19 pandemic. Of course Singer fell very soft, also because she is the daughter of the German neuroscience bigwig Wolf Singer (director of the Ernst-Strüngmann-Institute in Frankfurt).

Here is another Max Planck bully, who featured in March 2025 Shorts . Jan-Michael Rost is since 1999 director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, and professor at TU Dresden. He looks like a babyface, but he is certainly not nice or harmless. A joint investigation by Spiegel and Deutsche Welle revealed his massive bullying of subordinates. Watch here, in English:

Spiegel quoted in March 2025 Rost’s former postdoc Gabriel Lando:

“He got really angry, shouted at me, accused me of producing only “shit”,” says Gabriel Lando. “Fucking useless,” the professor called him. Lando had worked for the scientist for about three quarters of a year in spring 2021. […]
Sometimes Rost praised his ideas, only to dress him down a little later. This unpredictability has killing him, says Lando. In April 2021, the professor called him an autist, hit the table on several occasions. ”

Lando complained to an external law firm, which Max Planck Society employs to process whistleblower notification exactly because of the Tanja Singer scandal. The law firm denied Lando his request for anonymity: “people involved in the conflict must be mentioned at some point to enable examinations.” Max Planck Society confirmed that once a whistleblower agrees for their concerns to be forwarded, they will eventually lose their protection of anonymity. Just as it happened to Meyer’s victims in Konstanz.

Lando was of course not the only victim of Rost, others reported that he denigrated them and their work, “repeatedly shouted at them and slammed doors“. Another PhD student complained about Rost to the Chemical-Physical Technical section of the Max Planck Society (of which Rost until recently was director!), and predictably achieved nothing there. But the Ombudsman of the Max Planck Institute in Dresden (presumably Holger Kantz) did reply:

“He gave the student the advice that he should not annoy Rost and accuse him of bad supervision – only then he will have a chance to get his doctoral degree.”

That’s it, the case is closed. Rost can continue with his strong leadership.

Also the Nobel Prize laureate Svante Pääbo, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, was accused of bullying by the journalist Michael Balter. That was apparently not even investigated.

Sex pests

But while bullying is still seen as a sign of strong leadership in Germany, academic attitudes changed towards sexual harassment. Some case were mentioned here, especially a case in Mainz, where the perpetrator was never named in the German media while a certain Prof Dr med Christian Trautwein abruptly left his university clinic directorship and academia altogether, to work in a communal hospital in Stuttgart. Trautwein also published a lot of falsified science, as can be seen on PubPeer.

But then again, Bernhard Schick, head of otolaryngology at University of Saarland, was first fired and sentenced in court for sexual harassment of female doctors, as Bild reported, he allegedly “grabbed his colleagues’ crotch and breasts, put them under pressure and threatened to end their careers“, and that even while operating on patients. But then, both the criminal charges and the dismissal were overruled, the final court victory for Schick arrived in January 2026. He remains clinic director of his university, which will have to financially compensate him.

I previously wrote about Andreas Eckert, professor of history at Humboldt University Berlin, who is currently under investigation for sexual harassment and plagiarism, while his academic peers run signature campaign in his support. Read here:

As I reported in March 2023 Shorts, a German court decided that a philosophy professor at the University of Erfurt could be finally sacked for sexual harassment. MDR reported on 21 March 2023, translated:

“He had been accused of forcing female students to have sex with the promise of good grades. Among other things, the man is said to have forced a student to perform oral sex and harassed another in a similar way. Another student had rejected his sexually motivated contact attempts. The incidents happened in 2015.”

In initial verdict, a lower court decided that this professor was did commit some “serious” violations but could not be dismissed just because he initiated sex with his students. The Thuringian Ministry of Science and the professor both appealed.

Sometimes one really has to be grateful to the yellow press for clues, here Bild, who at least gives us a clue: “Carsten H”, then 59 years old philosophy professor at University of Erfurt. This is what a Google search delivers – a Prof Dr Carsten Held, specialising in philosophy of science, former dean of the philosophy faculty, and back in 2023 listed as “suspended”, his professional website has been deleted since. According to internet archive, the suspension was imposed between July and September 2020.

Wikipedia also links to a (now deleted) 2022 article which named Held as the perpetrator.

What a loss for the philosophy of science! This sex pest wasn’t just an expert on philosophy of science, but also on Quantum Mechanics! See Held 2008, Held 2012a, Held 2012b, or this book chapter from 2006: “The Bohr-Einstein Debate and the Fundamental Problem of Quantum Mechanics“.

The Perverts of Göttingen

The 2025 Nature article also mentions a case in Göttingen, of a Vietnam-born student at the University of Göttingen who was sexually harassed and beaten by her professor with an Asian BDSM fetish. It was originally reported by the German newspaper Zeit in June 2022, years after the abuse happened, I then covered it in March 2023 Shorts and named the suspect.

The Zeit journalists described him as the former director of the Department of Forest Zoology and Forest protection and of the Büsgen Institute, and claimed that he was called Sebastian Schmidt. That is what he did to that female student from Vietnam:

“he got angry and said: “In order for us to continue working together, I must punish you.” Then he locked the door to his office.
He took from his office table the bamboo stick which had always laid there, and ordered her to undress. As If she refused, he hit her bottom with the bamboo stick, 15 times, she remembers clearly. She didn’t fight back, did not yell for help.”

Two weeks later, “Schmidt did this to her again, 15 strokes with bamboo cane, then “at least once a month” for the following year, on the backside or bare calves, or: “Once he forced her to pull down her pants and slapped her with his hand on her bare behind.” There was always a reason for punishment: “an experiment not carried out carefully, 15 strokes; inaccurate protocol, 15 strokes.” The whole lab knew.

Only in 2018 did “Schmidt”’s abuse became subject to a university investigation and even a police matter. Because there were other victims who were molested and beaten, one of them reported “that the professor licked her ear several times“:

“Schmidt always sniffed her, says one. He locked her up and threatened her with beatings, says another. A third tells of how the professor regularly grabbed her chest and buttocks. They all say that Schmidt constantly pushed boundaries.”

“Schmidt” eventually found himself in court, in January 2022 he was charged with 21 felonies, including “for particularly serious cases of coercion, deprivation of liberty and sexual harassment”. The sexual harassment charges were dropped though, but “Schmidt” was still sentenced to 11 months on probation. A German professor, a white man of knowledge and learning, cannot go to jail, under no circumstances!

“Schmidt” still receives his full official salary, €8,000 a month. The university investigates and hopes to be able to fire him. But then again, why should they:

“Although he has been on leave, he wrote in the past three years at least two technical papers as a representative of the Georg-August University of Göttingen and attended at least one conference, in Portugal. His colleagues abroad do not seem to know anything about his conviction. One writes when asked: “He always has the highest level of professionalism proven and traded to the highest ethical standards.””

Unlike Zeit claimed, “Sebastian Schmidt” is not his real name. There are however numerous records of the Büsgen Institute’s former director Stefan Schütz (here, here, here, here, here or here), who on his profile photo looks exactly as the Zeit article describes “Schmidt” (“A slim man with long curls“). Schütz’ records at the institute server and elsewhere are mostly erased, but the internet doesn’t forget. Here for example is a backup of his lab from 2009.

And here a CV I found:

Finally, the Zeit article mentions:

“In Göttingen there is even another blatant case: A biology professor invited a student to the forest to do some kind of field test in 2017. There he has ejaculated before her eyes on a piece of meat. He later explained in court that it was a private experiment been trying to find out if human DNA can be extracted from the maggots that settle on the meat. He got eight months for it on probation.”

That other guy obviously is still working as professor at the University of Göttingen. But, dear students, you will only find out who he is once he gets his penis out in front of you. Well, there are clues who that charming man may have been.

As I wrote in March 2024 Shorts, a reader alerted me to a court verdict from 2023, apparently the accused perpetrator is Yakov Kuzyakov, a russian native and chair of the Department of Soil Science of Temperate Ecosystems at the University of Göttingen. The university tried to sack their russian professor for sexual harassment and his alcoholism, but failed.

The court verdict from 11 October 2023 ordered a demotion by two salary groups, but Kuzyakov retains his status as a university professor:

“In April 2018, the university filed a disciplinary action against the professor with the aim of removing him from his position as a civil servant. It made 44 individual allegations from the period 2006 to 2017, which related to continued sexual harassment below the criminal threshold and allowing and encouraging excessive consumption of alcohol. The defendant denied the allegations.[…]

The court considered it proven that the university professor had committed a serious misconduct. After questioning 19 witnesses, it was convinced that he had verbally and sexually harassed female students, doctoral candidates and employees on several occasions over a period of years. […] According to the court’s findings, the defendant exploited the special relationships of dependency that characterize universities in order to demonstrate power and violated the dignity of the women concerned.”

The court verdict mentioned that “after admonishing discussions in 2012 and 2013, the university did not attempt to influence the defendant through lower-threshold disciplinary measures, even though it became aware of further allegations“. The court then expressed its expectation “that the defendant will change his behavior in the future“.

In case you wonder why it took over 10 years for the University of Göttingen to act on Kuzyakov’s sexual harassment: he is a Highly Cited Researcher 2015-2023, with tight connection to russia and also China, who prides himself to have “published 95 papers in 2023, or 4 days per paper“. His coauthors are mostly Chinese, papermill origins are not unlikely. In fact, his friend is a certain Eric Lichtfouse, a known French papermiller in China:

Kuzyakov remains a professor on the public payroll, until he retires in a couple of years. The University of Göttingen gave up and continues celebrated this ork and his russian associates in their press releases.

By the way, Kuzyakov’s workplace alcoholism was excluded from investigation on court orders. Maybe that’s also why his sexual harassment wasn’t seen as such a big problem. We must respect his great russian culture!

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