By day American physicist Kenneth Long works with the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva. He wants to better understand the W boson, a subatomic particle that is responsible for some kinds of radioactivity and for fusion. But he also likes bikes, and this July you might find him on a scenic roadside, cheering on competitors in the Tour de France. He won’t have to take an international flight to spectate: Long moved abroad in February, splitting time between Lyon and Geneva as a scientist with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Long was brought to France by a recruitment program called Choose CNRS. The organization launched it last April, a few months after the Trump administration began cutting scientific programs in the U.S. The initiative aims to lure foreign researchers to Europe with stable positions, generous funding and promises of academic freedom. For many scientists from the U.S., programs like this one are a lifeline: a way to pursue world-class research without fighting against the funding cuts and disruptive policies currently stifling American science.
According to polls, application numbers and anecdata, many young American scientists are considering such moves. Three quarters of U.S. researchers who responded to a Nature poll conducted last March were thinking about moving abroad. The trend was especially apparent among early-career scientists: of the 690 postdocs and 340 Ph.D. students who responded, 803 said they were considering sailing for other shores.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Nature’s poll went out in the midst of significant threats to the American research enterprise. Last year the National Science Foundation terminated about $1 billion in grants and fired 10 percent of its employees; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration let roughly the same proportion go, and the National Institutes of Health lost 5 percent of its workers. At that agency, grants amounting to more than $1.8 billion were canceled. The government also proposed large future cuts to the research agencies that award scientists research grants. By early 2026 more than 10,000 people with STEM Ph.D.s had lost or left their jobs because of federal workforce cuts, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Interventions by courts and Congress have prevented or reversed some of the administration’s cuts, but for plenty of researchers science and academia still feel perilous—particularly for scientists like Long, who are just getting started. “Early-career and younger scientists definitely are affected more,” says Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest professional organizations for researchers. Older, more established scientists have their reputations and track records to rely on when they apply for grants from the smaller pot of money. Early-career scientists who are still forging those reputations will have a harder time getting their first big grants—and fewer of them will be able to do so. “There is an immeasurable level of anxiety,” Carney says.
A Nature poll found that three quarters of U.S. respondents were thinking of moving abroad.
Other countries are eager to benefit from this turmoil. Canada, for instance, is investing more than $1 billion in getting foreign scientists to come onboard and Canadians to come home. The European Union has devoted hundreds of millions to programs designed to attract scientists from other lands. The most geographically expansive is Choose Europe for Science, which was launched last May and includes incentives for younger researchers. The continent-scale initiative is complemented by 100 more from individual countries and regions, and Europe has expedited visa and residency processes so that scientists can capitalize on the opportunities with less bureaucracy. “This is Team Europe in action,” says Maciej Berestecki, a spokesperson for the European Commission.
What all of them offer, according to Berestecki, is to fill the gaps other nations leave. “We offer three things,” he says, “that researchers increasingly cannot take for granted elsewhere: stable and long-term funding, the freedom to pursue bold ideas, and an exceptional quality of life.” It’s not hard to figure out which countries he’s comparing the Continent to. “At a time when science is increasingly under pressure worldwide, Europe stands out ever more clearly as a place where the freedom of scientific research is actively protected and promoted,” Berestecki says. That’s appealing to young researchers who want to be able to build a scientific career and worry less about it being unbuilt underneath them.
Long didn’t initially plan to have a scientific career at all. “I was really thinking maybe I wanted to study theology,” he says, smiling from a Microsoft Teams screen this past March, just a couple of weeks after his big move. “I felt that’s where people answered the great questions of the world.”
Long thinks that those spiritual questions are still important but that they’re harder to answer objectively than those he explores in physics. That’s what he studied at Tennessee Tech University, where he did his undergraduate work. “To be honest, I wanted to get out of Tennessee back then, and I was pretty devastated to go study at a small university,” he says. “But I think in the end it was good for me, and I had very good professors, and sometimes it’s good to stay small.”
At least small was good before he decided to go big. When Long enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he did so in part because of the school’s partnership with CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider. There scientists like Long gather data to try to understand things smaller than the atom so they can map how they fit together to form our world, our universe. “The most fundamental thing,” Long says, almost wistfully. The questions the collider can study are not really so very different from those theologists do—they just involve a lot more numbers.
Long eventually did a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but spent much of his time back at CERN. Choose CNRS helped him move to France permanently, providing the kind of funding a young researcher needs to transition from precarious temporary worker to established and independent employee. With the program’s start-up funds, Long has been able to hire his own student and postdoc and, for the first time, become a principal investigator. It helps that in France the research infrastructure is much more centralized, with large, publicly funded science laboratories hiring scientists as permanent civil-servant employees.
“You have relatively more permanent researchers with a lot of research freedom,” Long says. And he doesn’t have to formulate his scientific questions based on what grant might pay him—which in the U.S. depends more on what the government wants to fund. “I think it’s nice to not have to chase your research topics based on what’s hot,” he says. Plus, he gets to play on the CERN soccer team against very European competitors, such as Rolex—a win-win in his view.
Work-life balance is something Finland’s foreign-recruitment efforts also emphasize. In fact, it’s part of the country’s new tagline for its Work in Finland program, which aims in part to bring onboard U.S. scientists and other high-tech talent: “Find your superposition in Finland.”
“Superposition” is the quantum ability of a subatomic particle to be in multiple states at once. “We think there is a nice analogy to that,” says Laura Lindeman, senior director and head of business for Work in Finland. “In Finland, you can have both a very beautiful career and other things in your life at the same time.”
Olga Aleksandrova
Previously, Finnish employers had found it hard to get many Americans to emigrate because they couldn’t compete with U.S. salaries. “But we thought, ‘Let’s try again and see if this has changed or not,’” Lindeman says of a recent revamp of the U.S.-centric efforts. After all, a lot has changed for Americans in the past couple of years. And maybe, she thought, Work in Finland just needed to let people know what its country was like—and how it was perhaps more appealing than what they might have at home. “One of the biggest challenges for Finland is that nobody knows us,” Lindeman says. “If they think about relocation, they don’t really think Finland first.”
So now representatives backed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment are telling them why they should think of Finland. Higher education, for instance, is free; childcare is subsidized; people have time for life outside of work. Taxes may be high, which Americans don’t always like, but that’s because they fund a full social safety net. “Finland is not for everyone,” Lindeman says, “yet we think that if a person values this balance and also values a society where good things are shared with others, then this is the right place to come.”
The country, Lindeman says, is small and not strongly hierarchical. If you want to meet or work with someone, you basically can. “One thing that is quite special in Finland is the cooperation that universities and other research institutions and companies, as well as the public sector, do together,” she says. It’s not as hard to be a big fish, in other words—and younger researchers can swim alongside whomever they want without having to fight their way upstream.
The upstream vibe in the U.S. is, in part, why another young American researcher is thinking of leaving the country. John, who wanted to go by a pseudonym because he’s still at his U.S. institution, is a mathematics postdoc at M.I.T. He thinks the front-page scientific problems in the U.S.—the funding cuts, the federal firings, the threats to universities—are mere symptoms of a larger illness within the academic research system: its competitive nature, its disconnection from many Americans’ lives, and university leadership’s failure to make the case to the people who hold the purse strings that they should support science.
“I didn’t grow up in an environment where people really went to college,” says John, who comes from Salem, Ore. Early on, though, he knew he had a penchant for math. And typically the way you do more math is to go to math school.
Which is what John did. When he came to M.I.T., he found that many of his peers had grown up in a very different environment, where their social circle was full of academics, all stressfully trying to one-up one another and vie for various measures of prestige—from jobs at fancy institutions to papers in the most renowned journals to the fattest grants. “Everything in American academia is a competition,” he says. “And that does not advance scientific understanding.”
In American academia, John says, many of his colleagues don’t understand how the public could have elected Donald Trump president. “They and the public knew that he was going to do an assault on universities,” he says. And a majority voted for him in spite of that. Or maybe, he adds, it’s because of all that. “That is the central question that universities have to ask themselves,” John says.
Why would people choose someone who would assault universities? In John’s view, it has a lot to do with the way academic culture, including its internal jockeying for success, feels distant to many people’s experiences: most people don’t see academics in their lives; they also don’t see themselves in academics. And there’s not a way, in many communities and many people’s lives, to make those connections. “They don’t see a path to being a scientist,” John says. They mistrust that sphere, he continues, seeing it as a “mysterious side world that they’re never going to be a part of.” And it’s one that says, within itself, “oh, I’m smarter than you,” John says. “Well, that kind of filters into the general public.”
John is tired of that environment, and he hasn’t survived the competition to find a permanent job in the U.S. The federal funding issues meant that the job market for new researchers looked bleak; one university he was interested in wasn’t hiring for new tenure-track positions at all. “That was a very chilling signal,” he says. So he’s thinking of seeking a math job in Europe. “Cognitively, intellectually, America is not in any good position,” he says. But in his view, that’s because of not just the scientific changes over the past couple of years but the systemic issues that led to the separation of scientific research from everyday life. “The villain of the story is more complicated than just Donald Trump,” John says, “and it’s more complicated than any one individual.” Those issues may not be solved entirely by going abroad. Academic science is competitive everywhere, and advanced math is just as arcane overseas as it is here. But it’s worth a shot—especially if you can get a job.
Whether John will get a job abroad is up in the air. And the same is true for displaced and displeased scientists across the U.S. Not everyone can, like Long, be part of Choose CNRS or another relocation program. “I’m sure there’s not the capacity to accept everybody that would hypothetically want to come,” John says. In 2022 there were around two million researchers in the U.S. The Choose Europe for Science pilot program, for instance, will fund on the scale of hundreds of researchers, who can be from any country—that’s fewer than the 1,200 who, in Nature’s poll, said they were considering leaving the U.S.
In some ways American researchers’ desire to leave is also not new or unique to this presidential administration. Scientists, Carney says, have always been a mobile workforce. Historically the U.S. has benefited from that churn by attracting scientists and getting “the best and brightest from all over the world because of the reputation of our higher-education institutions,” Carney says.
The flow of smart, motivated people from outside America into the country has made the U.S. a global leader in science and innovation, says Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics professor at Yale University. Since World War II the States have been the premier destination for the world’s STEM talent. “And then for the past couple of years I think the U.S. has made itself feel very unwelcoming to that science [and] engineering talent,” Mobarak says.
Other countries, Carney says, have been watching as the U.S. became a global leader, learning from the American innovation model. And as the U.S. has become less receptive to scientists who are from here and to those who once would have wanted to come here, other nations have stepped in to accept both kinds of researchers.
Some scientists will simply leave their fields; some may seek relocation. Either way, the U.S. may lose out.“What is the discovery that we’ve left on the table, whether it’s cutting the budget or losing the talent of an individual?” Carney asks. “What have we lost?”
