Roya Ensafi

1.0 1.0 / 5 1 reviews

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University: University of Michigan
Department: None
Website: None

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Total 1 Reviews

Anonymous

Bad

Posted:

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## Advisor Style & Mentorship, Lab Culture
Been wanting to write this review for a long time but was too worried about being deanonymized. Now that fear and cowardice has been fully surpassed by the shame and guilt of not warning future or prospective students to experience what I experienced working with Roya. She is vindictive, insecure, and volatile. She has full blown emotional breakdowns which she demands we save her from and clean up the mess. We do everything for her, down to writing her grants, her tweets, her emails, make her slides, run her events, which she insists is normal and "good for you". She absolutely demolished my mental health, making me feel (and telling me that I was) stupid, weak, not fit for graduate school, and emotionally a husk of my self. Her anger is terrifying, she will scream and berate you in front of your peers. She will ask your peers to monitor you behind your back. She will pit students against each other. She says that if you are not spending nights sleeping under your desk and crying then you are not working as hard as she did in grad school and you won't get anywhere. She told me she would purposely write a bad LoR for me if I tried to switch out so that I could "be hers". She told me that I couldn't get in anywhere else and she saved me from getting rejected all over and without her I wouldn't be able to go anywhere after either. She told me I was like a sibling to her. She told me that I was special, and she told me that I wasn't good enough. She didn't understand any paper we wrote or code we wrote. She had no ideas of her own and did not have any ability to talk about or discuss a single implementation done, which now has her name on it. The people around her help her to cover her a** and appear incredibly successful, ethical, and hardworking. It's all a rouse. She spammed my phone number for weeks after I left the lab to berate me and tell me how immature and weak I was for not being able to handle it. She's an incessant liar and exaggerator. She fluctuates between extreme insecurity breakdowns and bragging delusions of grandeur. She would launch tirades in my inbox late at night, delete them by the morning, and told me they never happened. When trying to switch to other advisors, she said, how dare I talk to other professors about applying, I made a fool of her. She once admitted she treats the women harder in the lab than the men because thats "how the world will treat you I need to toughen you up." She would tell me to do something and then I would do it and then she would tell me it was dangerous and a horrible terrifying idea and I should never have done that and how could I have thought that was a good idea. She told us "this work is transactional and when you prioritize my work I reciprocate" (e.g. saying we should prioritize drafting her emails/PR stuff over preparing for our own grad school milestones). 

Roya literally lives rent free in my mind, I'm terrified of bumping into her, seeing her at a conference, literally look over my shoulder etc. I still think of what I would say to her if I saw her. She overtook my whole life, my mental health, and I almost left academia entirely because I was so scared of having another experience like this, thinking it would completely break me. I thought about reporting this but we all know how reporting abuse at UMich goes.

Avoid her and her circle (including her husband J Alex Halderman) at all costs.

No, I don't recommend this PI.

Review #588

If you also had experience/knowledge of this PI, do you agree or disagree with this review? Comment below or write your own review.

: You're so brave for telling this story. Indeed, many of us constantly want to expose bad PIs but also constantly worried that the PIs may find out who wrote the reviews and retaliate. The worse a PI is, the more likely the PI will want to retaliate. But anyway, it's a noble deed to openly share what you've experienced and warn future students/postdocs of the potential danger.
Reply 2025-07-08T20:54:06Z
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