Neri Oxman, a former star professor at MIT, admitted to lifting passages from other scholars' work in her dissertation.Business Insider found 28 additional instances of plagiarism in her dissertation and other papers.Oxman lifted text from more than a dozen Wikipedia articles without attribution.

Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

Oxman is married to billionaire Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman, who has been vociferously campaigning for numerous university presidents to resign over what he perceives as their mishandling of student protests related to Israel's war in Gaza. Ackman has termed plagiarism a "very serious" offense.

He used revelations unearthed by right-wing activists that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized dozens of times across the body of her academic work to underscore his calls for her resignation. Gay stepped down on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Business Insider identified four instances in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars' work in her doctoral dissertation, completed at MIT in 2010. Three of those were passages where she should have used quotation marks but did not, and one included language from another author without any citation. In a post on X, Oxman admitted the plagiarism, apologized, and said she would review the primary sources and request corrections as needed.

"As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation," she wrote on X, "I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me."

In her response, Oxman described her mistakes as instances in which she "omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used." The cases she apologized for were similar in character to some cases that the Washington Free Beacon found in Claudine Gay's academic history — failures to use quotation marks around passages from works that were otherwise cited.

But a thorough review of her published work revealed that Oxman's failure to cite sources went beyond that — and included multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way. At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries.

The instances of plagiarism BI found on Friday are closer to a more common definition of plagiarism — the use of someone else's words without any indication that you are passing them off as your own.

Neri Oxman directly copied from Wikipedia in her Ph.D. dissertation

On page 81 of her dissertation, "Material-based Design Computation," Oxman published two sentences without attribution that had previously appeared on Wikipedia.

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"Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product," Oxman wrote. "By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warp faced textile. Conversely, if the warp is spread out, the weft can slide down and completely cover the warp, giving a weft faced textile, such as a tapestry or a Kilim rug."

The passage is presented in the dissertation as Oxman's original writing, without reference to any source for the sentences.

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The Wikipedia article for "Weaving" featured virtually identical sentences in April 2010, when Oxman's dissertation was submitted. "Both warp and weft can be visible in the final product. By spacing the warp more closely, it can completely cover the weft that binds it, giving a warpfaced textile … Conversely, if the warp is spread out, the weft can slide down and completely cover the warp, giving a weftfaced textile, such as a tapestry or a Kilim rug."

Substantially identical language was present in eight snapshots of the Wikipedia article that BI randomly reviewed going back to 2009, and variations of those lines have appeared in the article going at least as far back as November 2004, according to WikiBlame, a search tool that allows for quick comparisons of historic versions of Wikipedia articles.

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Oxman's cribbing from the "Weaving" article was one of 15 examples that BI found Oxman plagiarizing from a Wikipedia article in her dissertation. The articles she pulled from were primarily technical, covering topics like "Functionally graded material," "Manifolds," and "Constitutive equation."

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But Oxman never acknowledged having pulled from Wikipedia. She didn't just lift text, either: She also took an illustration from the article for "Heat flux" without citing a source, despite requirements in the image's Creative Commons license to credit where the picture came from. It's not surprising that Oxman wouldn't credit Wikipedia in her doctoral dissertation: While Wikipedia is generally accurate, anyone can edit it, so teachers regularly tell their students that they should not cite the website as an authority.

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"It's really a shame," said Rick Norwood, a math professor at East Tennessee State University who contributed a revision to the Wikipedia article on manifolds that Oxman repeated in her dissertation. "I can't imagine why anyone would do that, because anyone who knows even the rudiments of algebraic topology could come up with their own sentence."

Lifting copy from websites, a textbook, and academic papers

Oxman works at the intersection of design and the natural sciences and has used the label "material ecology" to describe her field. She once talked on a podcast about growing iPhones from nature. Her team at the MIT Media Lab coaxed silkworms to build sculptures. She also made undulating structures out of natural materials like cellulose and chitin, the material found in shrimp cells.

But like other academics, she also published lengthy, detailed research papers, sometimes with other authors and sometimes by herself. The bulk of the plagiarism BI found was in her dissertation, which runs more than 300 pages.

Wikipedia wasn't the only resource she cited without attribution in the paper that earned her a doctorate. In a footnote, she used 54 consecutive words without attribution from the website of the design-software maker Rhino to explain what a "Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline" is. She also used technical language about tessellations that matched language from the website Wolfram MathWorld — which, again, she didn't cite.

She plagiarized both before and after she received her Ph.D. in 2010. Of three peer-reviewed papers reviewed by BI, two — 2007's "Get Real: Towards Performance Driven Computational Geometry" and 2011's "Variable Property Rapid Prototyping" — also contained plagiarism.

The 2011 paper included more than 100 words exactly as they appeared in the 2005 book "Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age," without quotation marks, citation, or a mention in Oxman's bibliography. She pulled material from "Path planning of functionally graded material objects for layered manufacturing," a 2004 paper by M.Y. Zhou, without mentioning it in her bibliography. And she included two verbatim sentences from the 1999 book "Functionally Graded Materials: Design, Processing and Applications" without quotation marks or an in-line citation, though the work is mentioned in her bibliography.

The 2007 "Get Real" paper pulled language describing tensors — an algebraic concept that includes scalars and vectors — from an earlier-published work, the "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics." In a 2010 paper, "Per Formative: Towards a Post Materialist Paradigm in Architecture," that was not peer-reviewed, BI also found another instance of plagiarism, with Oxman using chunks of language from publisher Da Capo Press' description of "The Modern Language of Architecture" by Bruno Zevi.

MIT did not reply to a request for comment sent outside normal business hours.

BI sought comment from Ackman and Oxman; they declined via a spokesperson. But after BI had emailed its findings to Oxman, Ackman posted a response on X in which he promised to conduct plagiarism reviews of MIT's leadership.

"It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family. This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews," he wrote to his 1 million followers. He pledged to conduct a thorough review of MIT president Sally Kornbluth, all MIT faculty, and board members and other officers of the MIT Corporation for evidence of plagiarism, using MIT's plagiarism standards.

"We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency," he said.

Correction: January 6, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misidentified the school where math professor Rick Norwood works. It is East Tennessee State University, not Eastern Tennessee State University.