As CL reported last month, Zeyghami traveled to Iran in 2016 to visit a sick relative. But he got stuck there trying to obtain the documents to come back to Florida. He had been granted a visa to return to his solar power research at USF in January of 2017, but it was revoked when President Trump issued his first ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran. Nevertheless, he persisted in trying to return to Tampa. Courts halted Trump’s first “Muslim ban” and a second one remains legally questionable, but Zeyghami wandered around the region in an attempt to get back to his studies.
Because there’s no U.S. Embassy in Iran, he had traveled to Armenia for his previous attempts at a visa. He says he started from scratch in February.
“This time I couldn’t reserve or schedule an appointment in Armenia and I went to Cyprus,” Zeyghami said. “I reserved an interview date there and went to Cyprus through Turkey.”
Because it would be difficult and expensive to travel on a moment’s notice from Iran, Zeyghami lived with relatives in Turkey while he waited for word of the visa. From there, when the date for the visa appointment approached, Zeyghami went “to Cyprus and I did my interview.”
When the visa was finally granted, he traveled back to Tampa in late March. Now he’ll continue his graduate work in the mechanical engineering department at USF. As a Ph.D. candidate, he has worked for about four-and-a-half years developing renewable energy and solar power, including solar-assisted cooling systems.
I interviewed him on the USF Tampa campus outside an engineering building and in front of some of the solar panels Zeyghami has used as a research assistant at the Clean Energy Research Center. His work can be applied in areas far from sources of electricity “for cooling food and medicine at… remote locations.” He’s helping to develop a “heat exchanger that can emit the heat by radiation from the surface of the earth to the outer sky or cool down without using any water or electricity.”
“It’s not a new concept,” he said, “but we are doing it in a new way that can be used to cool buildings or any structure on earth without using energy or water.”
Zeyghami hopes the two-month delay because of the travel bans will not affect his degree. He expected to return to USF at the beginning of the spring semester but “I lost at least two or three months of my time here. My graduation is postponed at least one or two semesters and I was, I don’t know, financially under pressure, because I need to again travel and make visa interviews, go and pick it up. Everything was doubled for me.” But the stress didn’t go away until he got back on campus safely in the U.S., Zeyghami says.
“The main stressful thing was that there was an expectation that there will be another ban or something and I could go through the same thing again.” Zeyghami is back at school and can work on finishing his degree. And for that he credits the moral support and advocacy he got from friends and students, including from the Graduate Assistants United union.
“There were people contacting me and helping me contact the U.S. Embassy and asking for expedite[d] processing for me and I think that worked,” he said.
Seán Kinane is assistant director of news and public affairs at 88.5 FM WMNF Community Conscious Radio in Tampa. This article is based on his reporting for WMNF, which is archived at wmnf.org/news.
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2017.