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Iranian scientists in the United States face major upheaval
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A destroyed police building in Tehran, where the conflict in Iran has severely disrupted the lives of citizens, including students at home and abroad.Credit: Majid Saeedi/Getty
Babak wants to finish his PhD in 2028. He started his programme in 2024 at a university in the south of the United States. To stay on track, in July this year, he began writing the first paper on his health-care-related research. Between reading papers and coding, his attention wanders.
“I have to check the news to see if my country has been bombarded or not,” says Babak, who is from Iran. He and many of the researchers interviewed by Nature’s careers team for this article are using pseudonyms out of concern for their own safety and that of their families, as well as fears of potential career repercussions.
Life in the past year has been tumultuous for the people of Iran. The country has been engulfed in violence inflicted both by foreign nations and by its own government. The events have turned the lives of many Iranian students and early-career researchers upside down, both in Iran itself and in other countries — particularly the United States, where people from Iran have also faced restrictions on travel, visas and work. Nearly 12,000 Iranian postgraduate students were training in the United States during the 2024–25 academic year, according to Open Doors, an annual report published by the Institute of International Education in New York City.
In June 2025, Israel bombed nuclear and military facilities in Iran, and Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks in Israel, resulting in what is now referred to as the 12-day war. The United States also joined the conflict, carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The following December and January, an economic crisis in Iran — during which inflation hit 42% — sparked nationwide protests. In quashing these demonstrations, Iran’s government killed as many as 30,000 of its citizens, according to an estimate cited by The Guardian newspaper.
And in February, the United States and Israel attacked Iran over its nuclear-weapons programme in an ongoing conflict that has killed an estimated 20,000 people, both military and civilian, across all nations involved, according to Iran War Live, an independent open-source intelligence platform. One student told Nature that members of her family had had to leave their home in a city owing to bombardment and seek refuge in a village with some of their relatives. The Iranian government shut off the country’s Internet for nearly three months between February and May. During that time, Iranian researchers in other countries could not communicate consistently with loved ones in Iran.
Changes to US immigration policy upended the lives of Iranian researchers further. In June 2025, the administration of US President Donald Trump issued a travel ban that barred people from 12 countries, including Iran, from entering the United States, subject to limited exceptions and case-by-case waivers. According to the presidential proclamation, Iran was included because it “is a state sponsor of terrorism”.
‘Heartbreaking’: Iranian scientists on losing labs, libraries and liberty
Furthermore, in December 2025 and January 2026, two executive agency memos, citing reasons of national security, forced many Iranian researchers already in the United States into limbo over their immigration status. Together, the memos expanded the travel ban to 39 countries and effectively froze the processing of all applications from those countries, including those for student visas, permanent residency (also known as a green card) and work authorization.