The Crisis of Displaced Scientists—And How You Can Help

When Encieh Erfani left home in August of 2022, she packed light. She had a fellowship to visit a research institute in Mexico for a few months, then she’d return to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, a public research university in Iran where she was a physics professor. But then Mahsa Amini was killed.

Erfani had been in Mexico for only three weeks when news broke that a young woman in Tehran was arrested and beaten by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a hijab; Amini died in their custody three days later.

“It had a really profound effect on me,” says Erfani, an Iranian who years earlier had chosen to stop wearing a hijab when she traveled outside of the country. “I didn’t imagine that not wearing a hijab could lead to death.”

Erfani recalls watching the protests—which were started by university students—on the news. “They were shouting, ‘Why are our professors silent?’” The question resonated with her.

“I really asked myself, Why should I keep silent?” she says. “How much can I tolerate the situation of this regime?” She concluded that enough was enough.

Erfani wrote a short email to fellow faculty members and physics students. The last line explained that she was resigning in solidarity with the Iranian people. Fourteen hours later, a family member received a threatening call from the intelligence service asking about her, Erfani says. She knew she couldn’t return, even to pick up her employment and education records. At least not right away.

“I had a hope that these protests would lead to the collapse of the regime and I would be able to come back home after a few months,” she says. But it’s been two years now. Were she to go back home today, Erfani anticipates that she could face, at minimum, more than 20 years in jail for her criticisms of the regime.

Her story is one of many.

Hundreds of scientists—even thousands—can be displaced from their home countries in any given year, according to Michael Martin, a national laboratory scientist and advocate for displaced scientists. According to the National Academies, an estimated 5,000 have fled Ukraine alone since 2022. Persecution, conflicts, and war are simultaneously displacing scientists from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Haiti, Venezuela, Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, and other areas.

“It’s a constantly moving crisis,” Martin says. And if you broaden the scope of the conversation to include engineers, programmers, and other STEM personnel, the scale gets much larger.

In his work with the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund and the International Rescue Committee, Martin has witnessed the struggles of displaced scientists. He says there’s a tendency within the scientific community to assume that moving around as a scientist—even one forcibly displaced—is just a matter of sending out resumes, but the reality is more complicated.

Even if one sets aside the trauma of their circumstances, the challenges of getting to a friendly country, and language and culture obstacles, competing in the STEM job market—often with no local professional network—can be daunting. Degree names, publishing processes, scientific instruments, job titles, and even software packages aren’t consistent throughout the world, which means it can be challenging for employers to interpret the qualifications and skills of applicants.

“It’s not as simple as just dropping displaced scientists and STEM personnel into a different lab,” Martin says. “For instance, many scientists in the Middle East were heavily encouraged to write in the journals of their home countries in their native languages, and those aren’t necessarily recognized as being scientific accomplishments in the West.”

More broadly, employers may not fully understand the ways displaced STEM workers applied their skills in their home countries. For example, Martin worked with an Afghan engineer who kept roads and services accessible in the countryside during a period of high conflict. Another kept the lights on during the siege and fall of Kabul. “These are people who have clearly demonstrated the ability to do incredible things in their home countries but whose resumes may be a little bit harder to interpret,” he says.

In Erfani’s experience, institutions willing to host displaced scientists often consider only research excellence and publications. Skills like teaching, outreach, mentoring, and administration may not be valued—or even asked about.

Even if a displaced scientist is offered a position in another country, they may hit a wall that makes it impossible to accept that job—like a denied visa. There are programs to relocate technical personnel, but they can be stymied if the person’s home country is under sanctions or has poor diplomatic relations with the host country.

In such cases, “You can very frequently hit a situation where the scientists are opposed to their government at home but punished for the actions of the same government,” Martin says.

If that person is permanently displaced with no home to go back to, getting a visa can be even more difficult, Erfani says. Her visa requests often go unanswered, are denied, or experience long delays, even though she has publicly opposed the Iranian regime that sanctions are levied on. She is thankful to have a temporary fellowship and office at Mainz University in Germany, but she has no path to establishing residency, no lab, and no courses to teach.

“When I resigned, I was a faculty member in Iran, so I had my own group, my own students,” she says. “I’m not even employed by the university [here], according to their rules.”

Erfani’s days are spent applying for positions, trying to get visa requests approved, advocating for at-risk scientists and academic freedom, and taking courses in diplomacy (she’s especially interested in science diplomacy). She doesn’t know what’s next. Even with an offer for a position in another country, her status is at the mercy of the bureaucracy. “I packed my luggage for three months, and now it will be two years,” she says. Still, she doesn’t regret the decision to resign.

For many scientists like Erfani, at stake is an issue of humanity and furthering science. In a June 2024 editorial in Science about scientists in exile, Clemson University professor Gary Machlis and National Academies of Science senior director Franklin Carrero-Martínez write, “In addition to providing scientists with a safe haven (the humanitarian principle of ‘responsibility to protect’), it is critical to retain their specialized knowledge, expertise, and skills, and position them to aid in rebuilding their countries’ scholarly communities and science-based economies and training the next generation of scientists.”

Martin concurs. “If we wish to truly maintain science as a global enterprise, then there is this responsibility [to help],” he says. Otherwise, “It becomes a loss of perspective, a loss of field knowledge in particular areas, and, in some cases, if assistance is not there, it actually may mean the longer-term loss of a country’s scientific capacity.”

Many scientific organizations have established or renewed efforts to support displaced scientists in the last few years. They aim to help those who are temporarily displaced, such as by the war in Ukraine, and maintain their skills and expertise so they can help rebuild their country and its scientific capacity on their return. For scientists who cannot return home, like Erfani, the goal is helping them get to a place where they can continue their scientific pursuits and begin building a new life.

You can help.

One way to support displaced scientists is to fundraise for or donate to organizations that support them. Consider those that offer fellowships for displaced scholars, Erfani suggests. Securing one of these fellowships can increase a scientist’s odds of finding a host institution, but there are not nearly enough to meet the demand, she says.

Another way to help is to consider hiring displaced scientists or STEM personnel and encouraging those in your network to do so. Giving someone their first position in a new country can be especially important, even if it’s a nontraditional, short-term position, says Martin. It helps the person acclimate to the US workforce and demonstrate their technical skills to future employers. It may also help them start to establish residency.

Companies open to hiring displaced scientists and STEM personnel can reach out to organizations like the International Rescue Committee, particularly if they’re willing to consider applicants whose skills look a little different or who may need some time to adapt, while researchers can work with groups such as the Scholar Rescue Fund to offer placements.

Advocating for national policies that assist displaced scholars, such as visa programs, is a vital way to support at-risk scholars, says Erfani. In addition, being aware of what is happening around the world, sharing the stories of displaced scientists and STEM personnel, and volunteering with aid and advocacy organizations make a difference.

Physicists have a history of showing up for at-risk colleagues, perhaps most famously during the 1930s when they rallied to support those fleeing Nazi rule, among them Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, and Erwin Schrödinger. The community has advocated for many others, such as Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, Tiananmen Square protest leader Liu Gang, Cuban prisoner of consciousness Luis Grave de Peralta, and Iranian prisoners Omid Kokabee (arrested for refusing to work on military projects) and Narges Mohammadi (arrested for advocating for human rights). “Physics has a very proud tradition of supporting the human rights of scientists,” Martin says.

By getting involved, Sigma Pi Sigma members can help carry that legacy into the future.