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.
During that period, which stretched until June, the federal government would neither approve nor deny applications for work authorization or changes in legal status. This meant that people from those 39 countries were trapped in a bureaucratic limbo. For Iranian researchers in the United States, uncertainty about their career pathways, compounded with stress about loved ones in Iran, left many feeling a profound lack of agency over their future.
The researchers who spoke to Nature wanted to raise awareness of their situation among the academic community. But even offering their stories anonymously felt risky to many of them. Several expressed the fear of repercussions from the Iranian and US governments.
Lost opportunities
In what would turn out to be a horribly timed visit to see his family, Nima, a PhD student in health care in the southern United States, travelled to Iran in May 2025. Nima planned to be there for only two weeks, and to then return to the United States to marry his fiancée, who is also from Iran. He decided to visit because his mother was ill, and his father had told him they missed him. It was a risky choice, because although he had legal status to study in the United States, his visa — required for entry back into the country — had expired. He planned to apply for a new visa during his visit to Iran.
After the June 2025 travel ban, Nima could not return to the United States. He became distraught. “Every day I cried,” he says, speaking a year later from Iran. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. In August, he had to resign from his PhD, because his university limits a student’s leave of absence to two academic semesters. Even now, he has told few friends in Iran that he is back. “I think they will think I am a loser,” he says. Returning to Iran to see his family, he says, was “the worst decision of my life”.
During the Internet blackout, he texted with his fiancée every day using a VPN. They used voice or video calls rarely, because he would become too emotional. He was accepted into a health-care-related master’s programme in another country, but that country’s government did not grant him a visa in time to start the school year in September. He does not know when he will see his fiancée again.
Careers on pause
It wasn’t just the travel ban that upended lives. The pause on approving applications — as a result of the government memos — between December 2025 and June 2026 threw into disarray the lives of many Iranian students in the United States. One PhD student described feeling so burnt out that he often could not bear to leave his house. “You don’t know if you will have a job, or if you need to move to another country,” he says.
Several students say that the pause didn’t make sense to them. The United States has spent money training Iranian students, but it seemed that “they don’t want to take advantage of what they’ve invested in”, one PhD student says.
The policy supports the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce immigration — including by international students — according to Kevan Harris, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies Iranian politics. “The government increases the burden on people, and then some people just say, ‘Screw this, I’m leaving,’” says Harris.
International PhD students to face strict limits on time in the US
Azin, who earned a PhD from a university in the midwestern United States in December 2025, could not work because of the pause. Shortly after graduation, an engineering company in the United States wanted to hire her, but dropped the offer because she lacked work authorization, she says. A postdoc opportunity fell through for the same reason. She had applied for Optional Practical Training, a work authorization offered for up to three years to students who have completed a degree in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, but the pause froze that application as well.
She sold most of her possessions and did not have a permanent home or an income after she graduated. For half a year, she travelled around Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, North Carolina and Minnesota, staying with friends and family members for a few weeks at a time.
Nature reached out to the Trump administration to respond to these comments on the pause. A spokesperson for the Department of State said that the memos were issued to “protect the national security, public safety, and national interests of the United States and its people”.
“As the Secretary of State has said repeatedly, a visa is a privilege, not a right,” the spokesperson said. The department adjudicates each visa application on a case-by-case basis, they added.
