July 2026

Elham Neisani Samani Turns Her Own Infertility Struggle Into a Career of Healing

Elham Neisani Samani spent years helping other women through infertility before she became one of those women herself. In 2020, after three failed rounds of intrauterine insemination and months of disappointment, she and her husband decided to try in vitro fertilization.

“It was a decision filled with equal parts fear and hope,” she says.

The shots came daily. So did the doctor visits, the blood draws, the waiting. Elham Neisani Samani, an OB-GYN trained on three continents, describes those months as an emotional rollercoaster that never seemed to stop. Then, finally, a positive test. She calls the day she learned the IVF had worked the most overwhelming, beautiful moment of her life.

That single experience now sits at the center of a career built on treating, researching and talking openly about the very condition that once threatened her own plans for a family. Neisani Samani has practiced medicine in a Tehran hospital, a mountain village in western Iran, a Yale University research lab and, now, a residency program in the United States. Through all of it, she has kept circling back to the same idea. Women deserve real information about their bodies, not silence.

She’s not interested in keeping her own story quiet, either. Her older sister went through IVF for primary infertility years before Neisani Samani needed the same treatment, and watching that struggle up close changed how she saw her patients.

“When you’ve lived it, you can’t stay silent,” she says.

She frames her broader mission in plain terms. “My goal is simple: to make a meaningful difference, and to create a space where women feel safe to share their experiences, genuinely understood, and empowered to take charge of their health with confidence,” she says.

That line is the thread that connects a childhood in Tehran to a fellowship at Yale, and a quiet village clinic to an international stage.

Elham Neisani Samani’s Path From Tehran to a Yale Lab

Neisani Samani was born and raised in Tehran. She earned her medical degree and completed her OB-GYN residency at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, where she served as chief resident and won the national board award in the specialty.

After residency, she didn’t take the easy path. She moved to Naghan, a small mountain village in western Iran, to work as a health systems and quality improvement adviser for three community hospitals. The pay was modest. So was the housing. She calls it one of the most transformative stretches of her career, the place where she learned to build and sustain medical care in places that don’t have much of it.

From there she worked as an OB-GYN attending physician in Shadegan, and back in Tehran, splitting her time between patient care, teaching and mentoring medical students.

In 2013, on a scholarship from Yale School of Medicine, she moved to the United States to join Dr. Hugh S. Taylor’s laboratory at Yale University as a postdoctoral research fellow. There she studied endometriosis using mouse models, work she presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Endometriosis affects millions of women and remains chronically underdiagnosed, and her research aimed to sharpen how doctors find and treat it.

Research Awards and a Push for Better Tools

Neisani Samani has published more than 30 scientific papers and book chapters, with work appearing in journals including Stem Cells and Oncotarget, plus titles from Taylor & Francis Group. She co-authored “The Reference Book for Family Planning” and wrote the chapter “Endometrial Factor: A Reproductive Precision Medicine Approach,” published in 2017. She’s also set to contribute to “The Future Female Leader,” a book by Linda Ellis Eastman. In 2025 she began reviewing manuscripts for Reproductive BioMedicine Online.

Lately, her research interest has shifted toward artificial intelligence in women’s health, from AI-assisted diagnostics in high-risk pregnancies to oncology screening and personalized risk tools for underserved populations. She insists the technology only works if it’s built on diverse data sets, transparent algorithms and a steadfast, human-centered approach, particularly for the high-risk patients machine learning so often overlooks.

“Medicine is always evolving,” she says. “But compassion and empathy should always remain at the core of what we do.”

The honors have piled up alongside the publications. Marquis Who’s Who recognized her in 2025 for excellence in healthcare. She won the International Award for Women’s Health in 2021 and the Resident Award for Excellence in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in 2024, the latter tied to her research in reproductive science. She belongs to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Reproductive Investigation.

Why Elham Neisani Samani Speaks Openly About Infertility

Ask her about the biggest myths in fertility and she doesn’t hesitate. People assume infertility is a woman’s problem, she says, when male factors are involved in roughly half of all cases. People assume age only catches up with women, when men’s fertility declines too. People assume a prior pregnancy rules out future struggles, when secondary infertility is common. And then there’s the one that bothers her most.

“Infertility is a medical condition, not a mindset,” she says.

Misinformation, she says, fills the gaps that silence leaves behind. It spreads through well-meaning relatives, outdated cultural beliefs and unreliable corners of the internet.

“The right information at the right time can quite literally change the outcome of someone’s fertility journey,” she says.

She wants women paying attention earlier, not just when they’re trying to conceive. In someone’s 20s, that might mean simply tracking a cycle and noticing when something’s off. By the 30s, it can mean honest conversations with a doctor about timelines, hormone testing or egg freezing, options she thinks are worth exploring sooner rather than later.

She’s encouraged by how fast the field is moving. Preimplantation genetic testing has made IVF more precise. Egg freezing technology has improved. Research dollars are finally reaching endometriosis, PCOS and unexplained infertility, conditions she says were underfunded for too long. Telemedicine is reaching women in underserved areas who never had access to a reproductive specialist before.

She also points to community as part of the cure. The tests, the injections, the procedures and the waiting are only part of any fertility journey, and the emotional weight is heavy enough that no one should carry it alone.

“For many people, connection with others who share their experience brings a sense of hope that medicine alone cannot provide,” she says.

It’s why she wants her own platform to do similar work. “I want to bridge the gap between medical knowledge and lived experience, so that women who are just starting out feel informed and supported, and those in the thick of it know they are seen,” she says.

None of it erases the stigma, though, which she traces to cultural expectations that treat parenthood as a measure of worth and to old gender stereotypes that put blame on women. Roughly 1 in 6 adults worldwide experience infertility during their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization.

“When we open the conversation, we replace shame with solidarity, and that changes everything,” she says

A Mission That Extends Beyond the Clinic

For Elham Neisani Samani, medicine has never stopped at the exam room. She co-founded the Organization of Middle Eastern Girls and Women, a nonprofit built to help girls and women pursue higher education, build careers and develop leadership skills. She’s worked with Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, helping displaced people get access to health care and rebuild their lives. Since 2018 she has served as chief of Persian Women’s Health, advocating for better access and education within that community, and she has pushed for diversity and inclusion initiatives in academic medicine.

Her humanitarian résumé keeps growing. She’s an ambassador for Mindfulness First, an advocate with the American Red Cross in greater New York and a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders. She has trained in disaster response and humanitarian relief since 2018. She also writes poetry, a habit she uses to process resilience and give women’s experiences a voice on the page.

At home, she’s a wife and the mother of a daughter. She likes to cook, bake, hike and bike when she’s not on call. She says she’s grateful to her parents, sisters, husband, patients, friends and mentors, the people who carried her through both the professional climb and the personal one.

She measures her own progress simply. “I define success as growth with purpose, continuously improving while making a meaningful impact on patients’ lives,” she says.

Asked what she’d tell a woman who feels overwhelmed by her own fertility journey, Neisani Samani doesn’t offer easy comfort. She offers company.

“You are not alone,” she says. “Asking for help is not weakness, it is courage.”

That, in the end, is the whole point. Years from now, she expects to still be in some exam room, still listening to some patient’s fear. She’ll have an answer ready, because she’s been the patient too.