The director of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab stepped down Saturday after an outcry over his financial ties with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, whose contributions to the proudly contrarian lab roiled and divided its members.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” the director, Joichi Ito, wrote in an email to the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Martin A. Schmidt.

Ito acknowledged this past week taking $525,000 of Epstein’s money for the lab, as well as $1.2 million for his personal investment funds. He stepped down less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures that officials at the lab took to conceal its relationship with Epstein, who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

In a separate email to the lab community, Ito again apologized. “While this chapter is truly difficult, I am confident the lab will persevere,” he wrote.

Ito shared the emails with The Times after repeated requests for comment. He has been a board member of The New York Times Co. since 2012. The company did not immediately comment on Ito’s decision to leave MIT.

Ito, who took over the lab in 2011, had enjoyed strong support inside the lab, where he had helped raise more than $50 million in donations over the years. But the revelations in The New Yorker article eroded his support. Names began disappearing Saturday from an online petition in support of him that had been put up last month.

The internal lab emails, which a former lab employee shared with The New York Times, described donations that Epstein made and solicited over the years — including from Leon Black, founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, and a $2 million gift from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

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