Federal Judge Dismisses Former HBS Professor Francesca Gino’s Claims, Averting Trial

A federal judge ruled in favor of Harvard on Monday, dismissing all eight claims brought by former Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino and preventing them from going to trial.

The ruling grants summary judgment on all eight of Gino’s claims — a win for Harvard after it filed a motion in June asking U.S. District Court Judge Myong J. Joun to rule in its favor without a trial. A trial was previously scheduled for Dec. 7.

The ruling is the latest development in a yearslong legal battle that began after Gino was accused of data fabrication and academic misconduct in 2021 involving at least four of her studies. Gino, who has denied the allegations, sued Harvard in 2023, and the University revoked her tenure in 2025.

Joun upheld Harvard’s ability to revoke Gino’s tenure under the Third Statute, a University-wide provision that allows the removal of tenure in cases of “grave misconduct or neglect of duty.”

Joun also upheld HBS Dean Srikant M. Datar’s decision to impose sanctions on Gino, including requiring her to request retractions of scientific papers, placing her on leave for two years, and revoking her endowed professorship. Lawyers for Gino claimed that the sanctions were “so severe that they effectively mounted to revocation of tenure without a proper proceeding.”

But Joun ruled that the sanctions did not constitute premature termination of her tenured appointment, writing that “Harvard’s decision had a substantial contemporaneous evidentiary basis.”

Joun also ruled that Gino failed to demonstrate a causal link between her lawsuit against Harvard and her tenure revocation. Gino sued the University in August 2023, initially alleging defamation after Harvard accused her of research misconduct. Gino also alleged that Datar made a secret deal with professors behind Data Colada, an academic research blog that published a detailed account of alleged misconduct in Gino’s research. Joun wrote that the allegation was supported only by a “hearsay statement” from another HBS professor.

Joun also found that Gino failed to demonstrate that Harvard’s handling of the research misconduct allegations was discriminatory on the basis of sex. He wrote that the two male professors to whom she compared her case faced materially different allegations and that her broader claims of gender bias lacked sufficient evidence.

“The asserted procedural irregularities do not, without supported causal connection, compel or permit a reasonable finding that the decisionmakers acted because of her sex,” Joun wrote.

The ruling also raised questions about HBS’s policy for investigating research misconduct, which Harvard revised as it began looking into Gino’s research. Joun wrote that the “circumstances and timing of the Interim Policy’s adoption merit scrutiny,” but that they did not prove the policy was revised to target Gino specifically.

“Nothing in the Research Integrity Policy limits or prevents the Dean from establishing a new, more thorough policy to investigate research misconduct,” he wrote.

Gino and an HBS spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Joun emphasized that Monday’s ruling did not determine whether Gino committed research misconduct. Harvard’s defamation counterclaim against Gino, which alleges that she provided the University with a falsified dataset to rebut allegations of research fraud, remains ongoing. A separate Harvard motion seeking sanctions over alleged evidence concealment or destruction is also pending.

—Staff writer Katharine E. Chavez can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @KatharineEC7.