Amid talk of a brain drain, some scientists leave U.S. behind

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MONTPELLIER, France — When Pleuni Pennings and her family came to this university town in the south of France at the beginning of the year, the plan was to stay a few months for a sabbatical of sorts before returning home to the U.S. She and her husband thought about moving to Europe one day, and were scouting Montpellier as a possible future home.

After all, Pennings was originally from the Netherlands. But she, like so many, had moved to the U.S. for scientific training and had stuck around, becoming a professor at San Francisco State University. She and her husband — who is from Germany — had built a life in the U.S., with two born-and-raised American kids and a house in San Francisco. They weren’t planning on uprooting any time soon.

Then Pennings watched from afar as the second Trump administration started tearing into the scientific research system, and the hazy possibility of one day moving back to Europe became her current reality. Being an academic was hard enough in the U.S., and she grew pessimistic about her chances of winning grant funding. Pennings, an expert on how pathogens evolve resistance to drugs, was also a vociferous critic of President Trump on social media. Despite holding a green card, she became nervous about traveling back to the U.S. amid an immigration crackdown.

So she and her family stayed in France.

With that, Pennings became an embodiment of the concern that scientists, dispirited by the upheaval in the U.S. and restrictions on academic freedom, will leave for jobs abroad, imperiling America’s long-held pole position at the forefront of innovation. Top researchers have said they’ve received feelers from universities in Australia, Europe, and Asia, with China in particular emerging as the U.S.’s rival for scientific dominance. 

“A large part of what we loved about the United States is no longer there,” Pennings said, sitting in the warm Mediterranean December sun outside a student-packed dining hall at the University of Montpellier, where she has landed a contract position. 

Experts who track the scientific labor force say it’s too soon to know how many scientists have left the U.S. this year, or will be departing soon. Academic jobs are often negotiated months in advance, and the reflective data won’t be available for some time. While other countries have rolled out programs designed to recruit what they’ve taken to calling “refugee” scientists from the U.S., for now, it’s difficult to know if the exodus is a sizable wave or more of a few drops leaving a very large bucket.

Some movement is certainly occurring. The European Research Council, a funding body, which has boosted its support for researchers moving to Europe, has seen the number of applicants for early-career grants from the U.S. nearly triple in recent years, rising from 60 for the 2024 call, to 116 for 2025, to 169 for 2026. For grants for more senior researchers, the number of applicants from the U.S. rose from 23 for the 2024 call to 114 this year. 

STAT spoke with a half-dozen scientists who have left or are in the process of leaving the U.S., and while each had individual circumstances that enabled their move, there were two broad reasons for people to jump ship.

For some, it was more of a choice. They didn’t want to deal with the Trump administration’s policies or be subjected to the uncertainty that had infused the research world, a thick layer of instability on top of the already fragile state of academic science in the U.S. While there were other considerations, politics tipped the scales of their decisions.

Others sought work abroad because it was the work they could find. As American universities and individual labs grappled with funding cuts and grant freezes this year, many halted hiring new professors and postdoctoral fellows, pushing early-career researchers to look elsewhere. 

“I ideally wanted to stay in the U.S. because my family is here and everything,” said Audrey Lin, a postdoc at the American Museum of Natural History and an expert on ancient DNA, who is moving to the University of Vienna in the new year. “But my priority is my work. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” 

Some scientists said they looked at opportunities abroad and were ultimately dissuaded by the factors that have traditionally made Europe less appealing than the U.S. as a place to conduct research, including the lower salaries and levels of public funding. Others decided to stay stateside when confronting the logistics of moving across an ocean. While surveys like one from Nature in March found that 75% of U.S. researchers were considering moving abroad — or a more recent Elsevier poll that put it at 40% — the reality is that it’s much easier to say you’re weighing such an option than it is to actually find a position elsewhere and pack up camp. 

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‘The movement that’s not happening’

For decades, the U.S. has been the pinnacle of global science. Now experts fear it may have lost some of its luster, and that budding international researchers won’t — or for lack of job opportunities or immigration issues, can’t — take their next career step in the U.S. 

Available data so far indicate a mixed picture, suggesting that while the number of international students at American universities hasn’t changed much, there are fewer students from abroad starting programs. 

“The biggest movement I would guess is the movement that’s not happening — people who in a different year would have gone to the United States and they’re not going,” Pennings said. “Or people who are maybe in the United States as a postdoc or a Ph.D. student and they might no longer stay.” 

That traditional path had been Pennings’ trajectory. She did her undergraduate work in the Netherlands, then earned her Ph.D. in Germany. What followed were postdocs at Harvard and Stanford universities.

“Like many others, I moved to the US for opportunities in science and I was happy to be part of the US science enterprise for 15 years,” Pennings wrote in announcing that she had quit her U.S. job and stayed in France. “At Harvard, at Stanford and the last 10 years at San Francisco State University I worked alongside American and foreign scientists and students and most of the time it didn’t matter who was born where.”

Pennings didn’t have active grants in the U.S., but past support for her and her students has come from programs geared for teaching-focused schools like SF State, as opposed to major research universities, or for initiatives to diversify the sciences. Those awards were put on temporary hold this year, or cut off entirely. 

But there were other factors that caused them to stay in Europe, Pennings said. It helped that they were already here to begin with, and that the whole family has European passports; there were no visas to worry about. Pennings’ and her husband’s parents are still in Europe, so they’re closer to them as well, and Pennings’ husband can work remotely. 

Pennings also never got U.S. citizenship (the Netherlands broadly doesn’t allow its citizens to pick up a second passport), so she was nervous about returning to the U.S. It was hard to know just how legitimate those fears were, but there were stories about academics and green card holders being detained, so it felt like it wasn’t worth any risk. Her husband — who had become a U.S. citizen — went back to deal with selling their house and packing up their belongings.  

There have been challenges in France. Her kids, 11 and 9, were furious when they were told that the family was not heading back to San Francisco — though they’re adapting, picking up French and making friends. The family has made an offer on a house in Montpellier, but they still don’t feel fully settled. 

Pennings has at least found an academic home at the university, which is known for evolutionary biology and mathematical modeling. She’s now a part of the university’s Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier, at work on a paper about how drug resistance can be reversed. 

‘Dear John’ letter to U.S. science

Building an academic career in the U.S. had already grown increasingly difficult in recent years, young researchers point out. The Trump administration only destabilized the field further, spurring some to look elsewhere. 

Kevin Klatt, a nutrition expert and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, had been looking for a permanent professorship, but the search had not been easy. There was less funding for the type of experimental work he wants to conduct, Klatt said. 

This year, Klatt was weighing offers from a university in the U.S. and the University of Toronto. The cost of living in Toronto, the higher taxes, and the logistics of immigrating were all factors he considered, but the Trump administration’s actions helped nudge him to accept the Canadian offer. He didn’t want to deal with the whiplash of announced cuts, funding restorations, then further proposed slashes to research spending that has characterized this year in U.S. science. 

What helped, too, is that Toronto has renowned nutrition programs. 

“It didn’t seem that the U.S. was all that promising of a place to continue my career in an independent lab despite everything that MAHA says it wants to do,” he said, referencing the Make America Healthy Again movement. 

Others felt there was less of a choice in their moves abroad. Ben Weinhaus earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, focusing on how blood gets made in the bones during development, and had started applying to postdocs in the U.S. But some lab leaders told him they now had to use whatever funding they could hold onto to keep their current scientists employed. 

In October, Weinhaus moved to Münster, Germany, for a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, leaving his two cats behind with another student. 

“Many labs in the U.S. have paused hiring new scientists,” Weinhaus wrote in the Cincinnati Enquirer in August explaining how the administration’s moves pushed him to Germany, in what was effectively a “Dear John” letter to his home country. “This has already put the ‘brain drain’ in motion, forcing me and others to obtain our fellowships outside of the U.S.”

Weinhaus, who is practicing German on Duolingo, said colleagues have asked him whether he would stay in Germany. It’s hard to know, he told STAT, particularly when it feels like so much in the U.S. is up in the air.

“I don’t know. Even just a year ago, I never imagined moving here in the first place,” he said. But for now, he added, “I made the right choice.”

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Recruits from America, resentment from locals

It’s not just the Max Plancks or Oxfords that are drawing interest from Americans. Germany’s RWTH Aachen University is considered a good school, especially for engineering, but not a research powerhouse. So when a position for a junior professor opened up, the flood of applications from American researchers with Ivy League pedigrees and publications in top journals came as a bit of a shock. “That was the first time we’ve seen this level of interest from top-tier institutions in the U.S.,” said a faculty member familiar with the hiring process who asked for anonymity for fear of being targeted by border authorities on trips to the U.S.

Indeed, a number of countries, from Canada to Norway, Ireland to Austria, have set aside funding to try to attract American academics, or to lure back people who had gone to the U.S. to train. The E.U. put up 500 million euros. 

“The interest was huge,” said Sibylle Wentker of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which, together with Austrian universities, set up a program to bring 25 scientists from the U.S. for four-year fellowships. (Lin, of the Museum of Natural History, was one of the researchers selected for the program.)

Wentker said the Americans who applied for the fellowships were not only looking for stable work, but also expressed that they didn’t want to stick around a country where the leadership attacked scientists and impinged on academic freedom. 

Many experts also anticipate that the turmoil in the U.S. could broaden the pipeline of American-trained scientists heading to China, with some moves this year making news. The country has been pouring resources into biotechnology, and, at various points over the past decade, scientists from China in the U.S. have faced scrutiny from law enforcement agencies over possible ties to the Chinese government. Even before Trump’s second term, Princeton University researchers had estimated that since 2018, 70 to 100 well-established Chinese and Chinese American scientists were leaving the U.S. a year, with most of them likely going to China. The researchers are updating the data. 

China this year also launched a new K visa to attract scientific talent to the country. 

But in China, as in other parts of the world, some local researchers are bristling at the idea of sectioning off resources for scientists from abroad, said Alvin Yang, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who studies China’s role in the global science ecosystem. (Yang is also in the process of looking for professor jobs, across North America, Europe, and Asia, he said.)

Local scientists always want more funding, and in Europe, some unions have raised concerns over countries’ plans to spend millions of euros on American scientists when research budgets — already slim compared to what the U.S. spends — have been cut in recent years. 

“The narrative is, ‘Oh, the U.S. is closing down, other places are open, so people will go to Germany, go to Canada,’” but those places have challenges too, Yang said. It’s not as if European universities have tons of open jobs sitting unfilled, and even the dedicated programs that have attracted so much attention may hire a few dozen scientists at a time when far more seismic changes are happening in the U.S. 

That helps explain why the U.S. hasn’t entirely lost its reputation as the place budding scientists want to head, Yang said. It’s where many of the best labs are, and having a U.S. postdoc or Ph.D. on your resume feels like a major advantage. 

“From the postdocs I talk with, the U.S. is still attractive,” Yang said. The issue is that it’s been harder for early-career researchers in Europe to land a U.S. job. 

Pay cuts and peeling paint 

Robert Fofrich, a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of the scientists who poked around European opportunities but ultimately decided to stay in the U.S. When Fofrich, whose field of climate change mitigation has been targeted by the administration, considered the practicalities — what his wife would do for her career, how you build up enough credit to buy a car, possible language barriers — he decided against pursuing anything seriously.

He also encountered the reverse sticker shock that many Americans exploring jobs overseas run into: European countries broadly have lower salaries. One job Fofrich looked at in England would have been a promotion, but it would have also been a sizable pay cut.

“I’ve gone on vacation to these places, and they’re fantastic,” he said. But to actually move there was a different story. 

Fofrich said he had found some additional postdocs and staff scientist positions in the U.S. that he was now pursuing instead. 

In Montpellier, some of the lack of funding for academia is apparent. Walking up the stairs to a meeting with colleagues in the evolutionary science group, Pennings pointed to the sheets of yellow paint peeling off the walls. “As you can see, the French don’t have a lot of money for their buildings,” she said. 

While Pennings was able to get a contract at the university, she is still working on securing funding so she can start a small lab. The most promising avenue seems to be the pot of money France set aside for researchers leaving the U.S. 

Pennings still keeps up with some work with students back in the U.S., but more recently, she’s been getting emails from American students with a new type of question. They’re asking if she has any advice for getting into European Ph.D. programs. 

Megan Molteni contributed reporting.