A growing brain drain: US policies are spurring medical researchers to pursue other options

Abstract

In March 2025, after weeks of upheaval at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), brewing fights over academic freedom, and increasingly restrictive immigration policies, many researchers in the United States were starting to eye the exits. More than 75% of scientists who responded to a Nature poll said that they were “considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration.”¹ Early-career researchers were particularly apt to consider departing. Their top choices were Europe and Canada.

Other researchers are not even getting in the door or are opting for another entrance to a different career. The disruptions have affected many, including undergraduates who are not receiving internships, graduate students who are encountering closed programs and discontinued fellowships, and postdoctoral fellows and international scholars who are unable to access grants or work visas. “Literally at every single stage of the training spectrum, we have now disincentivized people to pursue these professional trajectories. It’s brain drain by a thousand paper cuts,” says Rachael Sirianni, PhD, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester.

The rest of the world has taken notice. A growing number of recruitment drives are vying to entice disgruntled or displaced researchers to Canada, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other countries. Gwen Nichols, MD, chief medical officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, says that a LinkedIn feed for scientists has been filled with recruitment offers from foreign countries and institutions. “If I’m seeing it, thousands of others are seeing it as well,” she says. Ironically, many of these efforts have been patterned after the past successes of the leader in medical research: the United States itself.

The United States, observers say, has long been a magnet for research talent from around the world because of its deep investments in research and its reputation as an attractive destination for immigrants. Both of those advantages are now in jeopardy, creating new openings for other countries. “The pullback on support of science, the rise of pseudoscience and that move away from experts and expertise, it’s got people worried; it’s got people thinking about other places,” says Brad Wouters, PhD, executive vice president of science and research at the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, Canada.

In April, UHN launched a program called Canada Leads, which aims to reverse the Toronto region’s own brain drain by recruiting 100 early-career medical researchers to UHN’s institutions, including Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital, and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. The $30 million initiative is providing money for supplemental salaries as well as laboratory space, mentorship, and partnerships with academic and industry collaborators. By the end of 2025, more than 600 scientists from around the world, including many from the United States, had registered their interest on the Canada Leads website.

Dr Wouters says that the program was a response to two developments in early 2025. “One was related to the announcements of the cutbacks in investment in research in the US,” he says. “Many universities, we were hearing, were reducing or even closing recruitment programs for that year just because of the cuts and the uncertainty.” As a result, an unusual number of talented young researchers were seeking other opportunities, giving Canada and UHN a chance to copy prior US investments to “attract the best and brightest.”

The second factor was a sudden shift in the political climate after the Trump administration imposed steep tariffs on Canadian auto imports and other goods (and challenged the longstanding border treaty). The fallout has caused Canada’s current government to pivot away from the United States as it seeks a new path forward.² Part of that calculus, Dr Wouters says, is “taking a step back and rethinking where does it need to strengthen its own economy going forward? And I think there was a realization that we had become overly dependent on the US in a number of economic sectors.”

One of those sectors is science. “What we said is that Canada needs to really double down on its commitment to a knowledge-based, science-based future economy,” Dr Wouters says. Here, too, the United States has provided both a compelling precedent and a new opening for competitors. A report by the nonprofit coalition United for Medical Research calculated that every US dollar spent by the NIH in Fiscal Year 2024 generated $2.56 in economic activity.³ The sudden funding cuts have led Canada and other countries to think more about how their own investments might help them to “capture a bigger part of that future market,’” Dr Wouters says.

UHN, he says, sees itself as a driver of local investment in research as well as an advocate for the bigger ambition of translating science initiatives into economic prosperity. By the end of 2025, its own effort was roughly halfway toward its goal of 100 recruits. In December, the Canadian government followed UHN’s lead by announcing the much larger $1.7 billion Canada Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative, a group of linked programs aimed at bringing both early-stage and world-leading researchers to the country.

Dr Noel says that his job decision predated the current turmoil in US research and had more to do with the considerable strengths of his new institutions, including healthcare policy, AI technology, and access to rich datasets. The supplemental award from Canada Leads reaffirmed his conviction that he had made the right decision, whereas the investment in scientific research convinced him that Canada was heading in the right direction. “Traditionally, I feel like we’ve been underfunded in a lot of those spaces, especially compared to the US, so I think it’s a nice moment for Canada,” he says.

Dr Sirianni, whose research has focused in large part on engineering and delivering drugs to the central nervous system to treat diseases such as pediatric medulloblastoma, has had the opposite experience. After moving her laboratory across the United States in 2022, she was tapping her new institution’s considerable startup funds to maintain continuity until she could apply for a new round of federal research grants. Then, in March 2025, the funding chaos at the NIH forced the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School—like many other US institutions—to freeze all internal spending, effectively bringing most of her laboratory’s research to a halt.

“Because my science got cut off, it puts me in this really terrible position,” Dr Sirianni says. To be competitive for new grants, she needs to conduct research that is now impossible with no funding and the inability to replace departed laboratory members. Meanwhile, the dramatic slowdown in the grant review process has added to the uncertainty over applications submitted long ago, including one dating back to the summer of 2024. “I’ve got multiple fundable grants that should be funded just waiting in purgatory with absolutely no idea of when there will be relief,” she says.

Dr Wouters emphasizes that Canadian institutions retain “extraordinary” collaborations with US institutions, and he notes that as the recipient of dozens of NIH grants and subawards, his own institution has been negatively affected by the US funding woes as well. For him, the turmoil has provided some bracing clarity on the outsized impact of the NIH’s investment on global research and the extensive ripple effect of its ongoing disruptions. “It’s being hurt right now, and some of that damage will be hard to ever repair. The idea that the most talented people in the world in science always wanted to go to the US: that may not be true even if the investment comes back,” he says. “I think this is a bit of a wakeup call for us to do more and to play a bigger role—and to reap the benefits of doing so.”