NEW YORK (AP) — Halley Froehlich was sure she would pursue her scientific career in the United States. His family has lived in America since the 1700s.
But over the past two years, the delay in federal grants and fears about the future have motivated her to put her life in boxes. She moved to Finland with her husband and daughter and is continuing her research – studying how the fish, shellfish and algae that humans eat respond to climate change – at the University of Helsinki.
When the Trump administration began upending American scientific research last year, dismantling federal grant award process And attempt to exert more political influence As for the funded projects, foreign universities saw an opportunity. They adopted programs to attract American researchers abroadpromising more stable funding streams and academic freedom.
Since then, many have taken the bait. Although there is no way to quantify the overall change nationwide, scientists, researchers and professional groups say the change is clear, unprecedented and concerning.
“You can almost talk to any vice president for research at a university and they will tell you about one or two top professors they lost,” said Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.
White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump was “ending waste” and was “committed to keeping America a world leader in scientific innovation, and that means funding real science.”
But more than half of U.S. states have lost scientists to recruitment programs in other countries, according to an April report of the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition. Last March, early-career biomedical scientists were about 20 percentage points less likely say that they would stay in the United States “now”compared to their memories of how they felt six months earlier. And doctorate in physics. graduates in 2025 have left the United States at the highest rate in 30 yearsaccording to the American Institute of Physics.
Countries like Canada, France, Belgium and Finland are touting their recruits to American institutions, a worrying and surprising development, scientists say, for a country that far leads the world in Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics and chemistry.
“It used to be the shiny city on the hill where we all wanted to go,” said Christine Stawitz, now at the University of Birmingham in England. “This loss of reputation, I think, is difficult to quantify, but it is also very damaging. »
Some American scientists are going abroad. Here’s why
Stawitz left her job at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year to become a research software engineer in the United Kingdom. She said NOAA no longer aligns with its values, especially after it was asked to remove websites with references to climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
She says the upheavals in American science are a recurring topic at scientific meetings. “Now people talk about the US at conferences in the UK and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on there. It’s not good,” she said.
Froehlich’s decision to leave was a slow one. She was already concerned about school safety and gun violence in the United States when the country’s research landscape was upended. Then, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his colleagues’ grants were postponed or canceled. Student researchers burst into his office in tears, unsure of how to handle their future. She worries about future federal funding for her own research, which focuses on climate change.
“The cumulative effect of these things ended up making us very serious, I don’t think this is our home,” Froehlich said. She was recruited through an initiative by the Finnish Research Council and now has guaranteed funding over five years totaling approximately $3 million. She moved into an apartment on the Baltic Sea in Helsinki and is taking Finnish classes offered by the university.
And international scientists are leaving the United States
International researchers attracted to the United States because of its reputation as a world leader in science are also looking for other places to do their work.
Married biologists James Letts and Maria Maldonado were recruited from Monash University in Australia and left behind their positions at the University of California, Davis. Letts is from Canada and Maldonado is from Argentina. Both received their doctorates in New York and spent more than a decade doing scientific research in the United States.
The uncertainty surrounding grants – including having to lay off a scientist while waiting for blocked funding – pushed them to take the plunge.
“All I want to do is do great science and make discoveries, but I also want my work to have meaning. And the opportunity to do that seemed very difficult in the United States,” Letts said.
Forty percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science were won by immigrants. Omar Yaghi, 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, left his post at the University of California at Berkeley this year to head an artificial intelligence laboratory at Tsinghua University in China.
The consequences of the loss of scientific talent
The United States remains a scientific powerhouse, teeming with institutions across the country with strong research communities and well-resourced institutions that attract foreign scientists. Even if all European countries opened their doors, there would still not be enough capacity to accommodate all American scientists.
And not everyone leaves. Many scientists choose to stay, looking for new sources of research funding or turning to jobs in industry.
But the reputation erosion and talent drain may not be over. The Trump administration has reduced or frozen up to $174 billion in federal subsidies since the start of the president’s second term, according to a tracker published by the United States Democracy Center and the Grant Witness organization. And a rule proposed by the Office of Management and Budget could give policymakers more control over which future projects are funded. A resolution approved by Congress delayed a final decision on the rule until December.
Scientists who have moved and those still in the United States worry about what is left behind. They say the next generation of scientists may struggle with fewer graduate programs, money and mentoring — and that it may take a decade or more for the American scientific enterprise to truly feel the effects.
Large research institutions accepted 15% fewer candidates for fall 2026 doctoral programs compared to last year, according to admissions data collected by the Association of American Universities. One of the students involved was a mentee of Smith’s.
“What’s one of my pieces of advice to this young man? Next year, look to Canada,” he said.
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