A senior official at Arizona State University has recommended the firing of Lawrence Krauss, a star physics professor who has been accused of sexual misconduct.

In February, BuzzFeed News revealed a decade-long history of allegations against Krauss, including groping women, making sexist comments to students, and telling an employee at Arizona State that he was going to buy her birth control so that she didn’t go on maternity leave.

A university investigation concluded in July that Krauss grabbed a woman’s breast at a 2016 meeting in Australia. Then Patrick Kenney, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recommended that he be dismissed, as first reported Thursday by the school’s student newspaper, the State Press.



Krauss has already lost positions at the university, including a foundation professorship, an honor bestowed to “outstanding faculty” by the president and provost, and leadership of the Origins Project, which for a decade held high-profile events at which leading scientists and public intellectuals discussed the origins of the universe, life, and social systems.

(Origins has since been subsumed into the Interplanetary Initiative, another project at ASU focusing on human space exploration.)

Krauss has denied all of the allegations against him. In March, he released a lengthy rebuttal to the BuzzFeed News article, which he described as “libelous” and based on “falsehoods and distortions.” In August, he responded to a fan on Twitter who asked if he was going to stay in Arizona: