Ig Nobels, the satirical awards that celebrate scientific work by asking it to “make people laugh and then think,” will be held in Zurich this year instead of the United States, organizers announced Monday. The move marks the first time the prize ceremony shifts from the U.S., organizers said, citing concerns that winners and international journalists could face problems obtaining visas to travel to the country.
In an email interview, Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, said the decision reflected a change in conditions for travel. Abrahams told The Associated Press that, during the past year, “it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” and he said the organizers “cannot in good conscience” ask new winners or the media covering the event to travel to the United States.
Abrahams said the relocation comes amid the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigration. The report said the crackdown includes a focus on deporting migrants in the United States illegally, as well as people holding student and visitor exchange visas—policies that organizers tied to the visa concerns that led Ig Nobels to leave the U.S. for the ceremony this year.
The Ig Nobels awards have been held annually in the run-up to the Nobel Prizes and, for decades, winners have traveled to the United States to collect their prizes and attend the ceremony. Organizers said that tradition has included winners arriving to events historically hosted around major U.S. universities, including past ceremonies at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.
The Associated Press report said last year’s winners included researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebralike stripes could prevent fly bites, and a group from Africa and Europe examining what types of pizza lizards preferred to eat. It also said the 10-category program included work involving alcohol and foreign-language speaking and separate research on fingernail growth.
Abrahams said the 36th ceremony will be produced in collaboration with institutions associated with the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich. He added that Switzerland has been a home for unexpected scientific and cultural developments, and he pointed to examples including Albert Einstein’s physics and the world economy as well as a reference to the cuckoo clock leap.
The report also quoted Milo Puhan, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich who won a Swiss Ig Nobel Prize in 2017, welcoming the event’s move. Puhan said the Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible “and does so with a wink,” and the report included a description of his own winning research on playing the didgeridoo to train upper-airway muscles, which he said can reduce nighttime snoring and the severity of sleep apnea.
Abrahams said Ig Nobels will be held in Zurich every other year, with the ceremony shifting to other European cities in between. He said there are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the United States.