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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.
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 on board 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.”
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