Halley Froehlich packed her life into boxes and moved her family to Finland, ending a scientific career she once expected to spend entirely in the United States. Her research on climate change had survived; her confidence in U.S. federal funding had not. She now works at the University of Helsinki.
Her family’s roots in America stretch back to the 1700s, yet delayed federal grants and worries about what lay ahead led her to depart over the past two years. Froehlich studies how fish, shellfish and seaweed that humans eat are responding to climate change, and she says the decision was a slow burn. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, colleagues’ grants kept getting postponed or canceled, and student researchers burst into her office in tears, unsure how to navigate their futures.
The cumulative effect of those things ultimately ended up making us really serious about, I don’t think here is our home anymore.
Halley Froehlich, now at the University of Helsinki
The numbers behind the exodus
The departures are broad enough to measure. An April report from the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition found that scientists have been drawn away by recruitment programs in other countries from more than half of American states. Early-career biomedical scientists surveyed last March were roughly 20 percentage points less likely to say they would “now” stay in the U.S. than they remembered feeling six months before. And physics Ph.D. graduates in 2025 left the country at the highest rate in 30 years, according to the American Institute of Physics.
Countries including Canada, France, Belgium and Finland are touting their recruits from U.S. institutions. That shift strikes scientists as alarming and unexpected in a nation that dominates the world by a wide margin in Nobel prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry. Forty percent of U.S. science Nobel Prizes were won by immigrants.
A climate scientist asked to strip climate from websites
Not everyone left for money. Christine Stawitz quit her job at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year to become a research software engineer at the University of Birmingham in England. She explained that NOAA had ceased to match her values, particularly once she was directed to remove climate change along with diversity, equity and inclusion material from websites.
“It used to be the shining city on the hill where we all want to go,” said Christine Stawitz, now at the University of Birmingham in England. “That reputational loss, I think, is hard to quantify, but also really damaging.”
Christine Stawitz, University of Birmingham
Stawitz says the upheaval in U.S. science is now a common subject at scientific meetings. People talk about the U.S. at conferences in the U.K. now like, I don't know what's going on there. It's not good,
she said.
Even Nobel laureates are moving
The losses reach the very top of the field. Omar Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry, departed his position at the University of California, Berkeley this year to head an artificial intelligence lab at China’s Tsinghua University. Married biologists James Letts and Maria Maldonado were recruited to Australia’s Monash University, leaving their posts at the University of California, Davis. Letts is from Canada, Maldonado from Argentina; both earned their doctoral degrees in New York and spent over a decade doing science in the U.S.
Grant-related uncertainty made them take the leap, including having to lay off a staff scientist while waiting for stalled funding. All I want to do is do great science and make discoveries, but I want my work to mean something as well. And the opportunity to do that seemed very difficult in the U.S.,
Letts said.
The White House response, and what’s left behind
The administration frames the cuts differently. White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Trump is “ending waste” and is committed to keeping America the world leader in scientific innovation, and that means funding real science.
The U.S. remains a science powerhouse, full of institutions with large research communities that still attract foreign scientists. But scientists who have moved away, and those still in the U.S., worry about what comes next: fewer graduate programs, money and mentorship for the next generation, with effects that could take a decade or longer to fully appear. Admissions data gathered by the Association of American Universities shows that major research institutions took in 15% fewer applicants for fall 2026 doctoral programs than in the previous year.
One of the students affected was a mentee of Tobin Smith’s, and his advice to the young man was blunt: Next year, look in Canada.
