After 35 years in the United States, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is moving to Europe. This coming September, the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland.
Organised by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the awards celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative, and spur interest in science. Winners travel to the ceremony from around the world, to collect their prizes and be showered with paper aeroplanes. The move marks a dramatic rupture with decades of tradition at Harvard University, MIT, and Boston University.
Marc Abrahams, founder and emcee of the ceremony and editor of the magazine, explains: "During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country." Organisers cited concerns over attendees, including international journalists, being able to obtain US travel visas as the reason for the shift.
The situation reflects a concrete problem that has emerged over recent months. In 2025, four out of the 10 Ig Nobel Prize winners chose not to travel to the US amid President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigration and freedom of speech. In March 2025, a French scientist was denied entry into the US after immigration officers at the airport searched his phone and found messages criticising the current administration. In an interview in December, Abrahams told the AFP news agency that several prize-winners had decided not to attend the 2025 awards ceremony for fear of being harassed by the US authorities.
These incidents transformed an abstract concern into an operational crisis. When the founder of a 35-year-old international scientific institution concludes it cannot guarantee the safety and welcome of its own guests, the decision to relocate becomes a measure of broader tensions. The Trump administration suspends visa processing from 75 countries, including those in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and eastern Europe.
The 2026 event is being produced in collaboration with institutions of the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and the University of Zurich. Despite the move, Abrahams emphasised that the Ig Nobel Prizes are not abandoning the USA. "This autumn, 2026, we very much WILL have an event in Boston to celebrate the Ig Nobel Prizes, but this new Boston celebration will be of a different nature. A few weeks AFTER the winners are introduced at the Zurich ceremony, we'll have a nocturnal gathering of past Ig Nobel Prize winners, Nobel laureates, musicians performing songs by Tom Lehrer, paintings from the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), and hundreds of gleeful people throwing paper aeroplanes."
For the future, the general plan is to hold the ceremony in Zurich this year, and again every 2nd year, thus in 2028 again. Each interim year, each odd-numbered year, the ceremony will be hosted in a different city.
The move carries genuine symbolic weight. The Ig Nobels are not a minor concern; they represent the global scientific conversation at its most candid and unpretentious. At the event, winners are awarded tacky trophies, such as a piece of paper and 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, a demonetised currency rendered worthless by hyperinflation. However, real Nobel laureates perform the prize-giving and are often happy to join in with the madcap event.
The legitimacy of any international gathering depends on participants feeling secure and welcomed. By that standard, the organisers face a genuine problem, not a political posture. Yet observers might reasonably ask whether a temporary relocation solves anything or merely postpones the underlying question: whether the United States remains a reliable host for international scientific exchange.