Organizers of the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting (pictured, a past meeting), which started 15 December, expect it to draw fewer visitors than it did in 2024.Credit: Marek Uliasz/imageBROKER/Alamy
Attendance at several of the biggest science conferences held in the United States either fell this year compared with last year or is expected to fall in 2026. There are many reasons for the changes, but at least some researchers are curbing their travel to the United States because of policies put in place by the administration of US President Donald Trump.
The obstacles have galvanized some meeting organizers to hatch alternative plans to bring the international research community together.
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Earlier this month, for instance, the artificial-intelligence (AI) conference NeurIPS hosted not only its main meeting in San Diego, California, but also its first-ever alternative location, in Mexico City, with the goal of alleviating travel challenges. Meanwhile, a group of AI researchers in Europe organized an independent spinoff conference, dubbed EurIPS, in Copenhagen.
“Our main focus was on giving a home to people who felt intellectually homeless this year,” says Søren Hauberg, a machine-learning and computer-vision researcher at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby who helped to organize EurIPS.
Smaller crowds
Nature asked the organizers of large conferences that were scheduled to take place in US cities in the second half of 2025 or the first quarter of 2026 for details of their attendance trends. Of the six that responded, three had seen or were expecting a drop in attendance compared with the previous year.
In some cases, the observed decrease was slight, and the reasons were complex. For instance, attendance at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting last month was down 6%, from 22,359 people in 2024 to 21,093 this year. The number of countries those attendees represented also fell, from 88 in 2024 to 73 in 2025. Organizers of the conference, one of the biggest in the United States, say that attendance has fluctuated since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, making it difficult to pinpoint the effect Trump’s policies have had.
Organizers of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference, another of the nation’s largest meetings, say that they also are seeing a drop in numbers at the 2025 meeting, which began on Monday, compared with 2024. More than 30,000 people attended last year’s AGU conference; more than 20,000 were registered for this year’s as of Monday, conference organizers say. The lighter attendance was notable in the poster and exhibit halls, which were slightly less jam-packed than usual.
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