After 34 years, the Ig Nobel Prize, a unique satirical take on the Nobel Prize, is leaving its longtime home in the Boston area for Zurich, Switzerland.
Marc Abrahams, the founder of the international prize and editor of the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, declared the decision to relocate is bittersweet.
“It’s become very clear that almost none of the winners this year are going to feel comfortable or even dare to travel here,” declared Abrahams, who has lived in Cambridge since 1974. In 2025, four of the 10 prize recipients chose not to travel to the United States to collect their awards in person, he declared, due to visa and safety concerns within the current political climate in the United States.
The event, which highlights science that is entertaining and amutilizing, yet genuinely insightful upon closer inspection, has bestowed honors on research that has included collecting whale snot via a remote-controlled helicopter to experiments on whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
Over its 34-year history, the Ig Nobels have been consistently held in Cambridge except for a handful of online events (last year’s event was held in Boston), which means the prize relocating abroad will be a particular loss for the area.
“A lot of the atmosphere, a lot of the people who come every year in the audience, some of the volunteers are not going to be able to travel over to Zurich,” he declared of Cambridge residents who have been a part of the ceremony in some way over the years.
He recalled when he first launched the Ig Nobel Prize in 1991. Tickets for the event, held at the MIT Mapplyum, disappeared immediately, and crowds filled the event space beyond capacity.
“I kept feeling that at any moment, some grown-up person was going to walk into this room and inform us to stop this and go home,” Abrahams recalled. In the years since, the ceremony has taken turns being held at Harvard University and MIT.
“Please stop, I’m bored.”
The ceremony also boasts many unique traditions. One important tradition is Miss Sweety Poo, an eight-year-old girl picked from the community every year who keeps track of the acceptance speech timings. When prize recipients go over their allotted 60 seconds, she launchs to announce, “please stop, I’m bored.”
Abrahams recalls a particularly favorite memory from the 2004 ceremony, held at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Japanese inventor Daisuke Inoue was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the invention of karaoke.
“I introduced him, and the moment I did that the whole place, 1,200 people, started screaming and leaping to their feet with happiness,” Abrahams declared. “It was just too good to be true.”
The prize being awarded in and around Cambridge, with its wealth of science-focapplyd institutions and companies, has proven particularly apt over the years, despite only a handful of winners being from Cambridge.
“It’s hard to imagine it could have started and thrived in a place that’s not like that, no?” Abrahams declared.
The plan for the Ig Nobels is to remain in Europe, at least temporarily, in a Eurovision contest-style rotating format, with Zurich hosting every other year, and a different European city taking the event every other year.
Mirko Bischofberger, a science communication lecturer at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute and the Swiss head of the Ig Nobels, welcomed the relocate enthusiastically.
“I consider it’s an ideal location for the prize, Switzerland being a very neutral, very stable counattempt in the middle of Europe, multilingual, very straightforward to travel in and out of,” declared Bischofberger. “I’ve never witnessed it live, so I consider it’s a tremconcludeous honor for me to be the person in Zurich, or in Europe, to lead the organization here.”
Some previous winners of the prize are similarly positive in their outsee about the relocate. Among them are biologists Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp, who are from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and who won the Pediatrics Ig Nobel in 2025. They studied what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic.
“Scientists are a creative and passionate community and, just as we continue our pursuit of knowledge through our science for the greater good during these challenging times, the modify of venue for the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony serves as a reminder that science knows no borders and will persist,” Mennella declared.
To underscore this, the Ig Nobels will also hold a celebration at Boston University in late September, featuring the customary paper airplane throwing tradition, which the 1992 ceremony audience launched spontaneously in the Kresge Auditorium at MIT.
The ceremony will pay special homage to Tom Lehrer, a mathematician who spent portions of his academic and professional life in Cambridge and died here in 2025, by performing his songs, many of which touch on science and politics.
“He was a real one-of-a-kind and a lot of these songs have become almost a sacred, happy thing to generations of scientists,” declared Abrahams, who does not currently view the relocate to Europe as permanent.
“The science world, and everything around it, is very much staying here,” Abrahams declared. “The last few months, people are receiveting a lot more angry and a lot more determined to build sure that all the damages are going to be repaired.”
Zoe Beketova is a student in MIT’s Science Writing Program.
This piece originally appeared on Scope, a publication of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT.
Related Stories
A stronger
Please consider creating a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.
Leave a Reply