Who is Delaram Pouyabahar, the Canadian based researcher whose Harvard plans collapsed after visa bans

A Canadian based computational biologist with a growing international profile saw her planned move to Harvard University unravel after a new US travel ban halted visa processing for researchers from Iran. Delaram Pouyabahar had completed interviews, fellowship applications and a consular appointment when the policy change took effect, leaving her unable to take up a postdoctoral position she had spent months preparing for.

The expanded travel restrictions, announced on June 4, 2025, removed previous academic exemptions and stalled new entries from several countries, including Iran. Pouyabahar later said the process simply stopped, explaining in a public statement that she never received a final response after her interview, a situation she described as months of unresolved uncertainty.
A researcher shaped by interdisciplinary science
Pouyabahar is an Iranian born scientist specialising in computational biology, with a focus on machine learning approaches for single cell and spatial transcriptomics. Based at the University of Toronto, she works at the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, where she continues her postdoctoral research after redirecting her career plans away from the US.

Her academic work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and life sciences, developing statistical and machine learning tools that help researchers interpret complex biological data. One of her peer reviewed studies in Nature Communications has been cited more than 200 times, a figure that places her among highly cited early career researchers in the field.

Education and early research training
Pouyabahar completed a PhD in computational biology at the University of Toronto between 2019 and 2025, following a BSc in cell and molecular biology from the University of Tehran. During her doctoral training, she developed computational frameworks for analysing large scale single cell RNA sequencing data under the supervision of Professor Gary Bader.

Her earlier research experience includes a visiting internship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, where she worked on protein structure analysis, and bioinformatics research roles at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. These positions laid the foundation for her later focus on interpretable machine learning in genomics.

Publications and academic profile
Pouyabahar has co authored studies in journals including Nature Communications, Nature Protocols, Cell Genomics, iScience and Analytical Chemistry. Her work spans single cell atlases, differential expression modelling and interpretable factor decomposition, with applications across liver biology, immunology and cancer research.

She has also presented her research at international conferences such as ISMB and Keystone Symposia, and has contributed as a reviewer for journals including Nature Biotechnology and Scientific Reports.

The Harvard offer and its collapse
The postdoctoral role at Harvard was supported by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. When early reports of policy changes emerged, Pouyabahar accelerated her PhD defence, a decision she later described as an attempt to protect her plans, according to her public account.

After the ban took effect, she said that seeking exemptions was unlikely to help under the new framework. In comments shared publicly, she said the experience left her weighing career disruption against stability, adding that she felt “a reluctant sense of relief” at remaining in Canada, where immigration pathways for researchers are more predictable.

Continuing work in Canada
Pouyabahar now holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto under Dr Aleksandrina Goeva, developing methods to identify disease associated cell states in spatial transcriptomics datasets. Her career, while redirected, continues within Canada’s research system, following a path reshaped by global immigration policy rather than academic choice.
Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!