American universities have spent the past two years debating which speakers to allow on campus, which books to assign, and which ideological frameworks are acceptable in the classroom. One conversation they haven’t been having: whether the children of the men running the Islamic Republic should be shaping the minds of American students.
A new wave of reporting — led by the New York Post and the Daily Wire — answers the question of whether that’s actually happening. It is. At some of the most prominent universities in the country.
Here are the names.
Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani was an assistant professor at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta until January 2026. Her father, Ali Larijani, is not a minor figure in the Iranian government. He is the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security — the body that coordinates Iran’s military, intelligence, and foreign policy — appointed directly by Supreme Leader Khamenei. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Ali Larijani in January 2026, citing his role in directing security forces to suppress Iranian protesters. His daughter was teaching cancer medicine to American medical students in Atlanta. Emory terminated her employment approximately two weeks after the sanctions were imposed, following a protest outside the cancer institute and a formal demand from Congressman Buddy Carter.
Leila Khatami is an associate professor of mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Her father is Mohammad Khatami, the former President of Iran. Her aunt, Zahra Eshraghi, is the granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the founder of the Islamic Republic. After U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran began, Union College quietly removed her photo and biography from the math department’s faculty page. She remains employed. The Committee of Concerned Scientists has issued a statement opposing any termination based on family background.
Zahra Mohaghegh is a full professor in nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the SoTeRiA Research Laboratory and has received grants from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Her father is Ayatollah Seyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, a senior Iranian jurist. Her mother’s family name is Ardeshir Larijani — making her the niece of Ali Larijani, the sanctioned head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. She is teaching nuclear engineering. With Department of Energy funding. While her uncle coordinates Iran’s weapons and intelligence posture.
Eissa Hashemi teaches organizational leadership at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles. His mother is Masoumeh Ebtekar — known to American audiences from the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when she served as the English-language spokesperson for the student militants who held 52 American diplomats for 444 days. American media at the time called her “Screaming Mary.” Ebtekar later became the highest-ranking woman in Iran’s government, serving as Vice President for Women’s Affairs until 2021.
Ehsan and Niloofar Nobakht Haghighi are siblings. Ehsan is an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Niloofar is a clinical professor of nephrology at UCLA. Their family’s connections run to the upper levels of Iranian government administration, including Ali Nobakht, a former Iranian Deputy Minister of Health, and Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, a Vice President of Iran who headed the country’s Plan and Budget Organization.
The case against each of these individuals is not that they have committed a crime. As Iran International and other outlets have noted, none of those identified have been linked to illegal activity. The concern is different — and it is one that Janatan Sayeh, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has articulated with unusual directness.
“Iranian academics have been critical in forming public opinion on the left in the U.S.,” Sayeh told reporters, “essentially deceiving liberals into thinking that the regime is more progressive, when it’s still advancing the same hardline agenda.”
The reach of this network is broader than individual cases suggest. Analysts and Iranian diaspora organizations put the total number of relatives of prominent Iranian regime officials living in the United States at between 4,000 and 5,000 — spanning academic, professional, and student roles. Tracking them is difficult by design. As Sayeh noted, “A lot of them are nephews and nieces and it’s hard to track them because they don’t have the same last name as the regime leaders.”
The individuals named above are not an anomaly. They are the visible tip of a network that embedded itself into American higher education over years, largely without scrutiny. The same universities that couldn’t agree on whether to condemn Hamas found no difficulty hosting the family members of the government that funds Hamas, trains Hezbollah, and has just been engaged in active military conflict with the United States.
The most striking case is the nuclear engineering professor. Zahra Mohaghegh has built a research program at one of America’s top engineering universities, funded in part by the Department of Energy, while her uncle sits atop Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The question of whether any information — formal or informal, intentional or incidental — travels through those family connections is not a paranoid one. It is the ordinary counterintelligence question that applies to any researcher with family ties to an adversarial government’s senior security apparatus.
One professor was fired. Five are still teaching. The full list is longer than what’s been published.
American families sending their children to these universities have a reasonable interest in knowing who is standing at the front of the classroom — and who their family is.