The Boston Globe
January 8, 2010
By Tracy Jan
A former Tufts University researcher and lecturer has filed a lawsuit accusing a prominent chemistry professor of sexual harassment and gender discrimination during the four years she worked with him on NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission to study whether the planet is hospitable to life.
Suzanne Young alleges in the suit that Samuel Kounaves, a Tufts associate professor who was a co-investigator for the high-profile space project from 2003 to 2009, made repeated requests for “sexual favors’’ and told her that consent would be a basis for future employment decisions.
Among the many allegations, Young says that Kounaves insisted she live with him whenever they were at the science team’s headquarters in Tucson and threatened to deny her lodging reimbursement when she refused. She said he pressured her to share meals with him during business trips, going so far as to fabricate a business dinner with colleagues to keep her from dining with other attendees at a scientific workshop in Houston in 2006.
Young’s teaching and research contracts were not renewed after she complained to the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity in fall 2008, following what she says was an escalation of the harassment by Kounaves. Her suit alleges that at least three other women have complained about Kounaves’s “offensive, demeaning, and insulting behavior toward them’’ in the past.
Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/08/former_nasa_researcher_files_sex_harassment_suit_accusing_tufts_professor/
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