France and Canada have now put hard numbers on a shift that had mostly been discussed as a risk. France selected 46 researchers for the first cohort of Choose France for Science, with 41 coming from US institutions. In August 2026, Canada announced 64 new research chairs, 48 of them researchers leaving US institutions.
Eighty-nine US-based researchers across those two headline groups do not amount to a mass exodus. But they do show that governments outside the United States are putting substantial public money behind efforts to attract scientists at a moment of unusual uncertainty around American research funding, grant policy and academic mobility.
The pitch from Paris
Choose France for Science was launched in 2025 and is operated by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under France 2030. France’s official profile of the first 46 recipients shows that 41 were based at US institutions, including eight at Columbia University, four at UCLA and researchers at Stanford, MIT, NASA, Harvard and several other major institutions.
The cohort is not exclusively made up of senior principal investigators. France’s own breakdown includes young post-PhD researchers, early-career scientists, mid-career researchers and more established figures. What unites them is that they were working abroad and were selected to build or join research programmes in France.
The ANR programme funds major projects over three years. Host institutions contribute to project costs, while the French government can provide additional funding of up to 50% of the total project amount. Successful researchers are also expected to pursue a competitive European or international grant within two years of taking up their post.
Columbia became a particularly visible source of recruits after federal funding disputes hit the university in 2025. The PIE News reported that eight researchers in the French cohort came from Columbia, where roughly $400 million in federal grants had been frozen and almost 180 employees had received termination or non-renewal notices before the university reached a $200 million settlement with the administration.
Canada’s August haul
Canada’s announcement came on August 27, 2026. The PIE News reported that 48 of the 64 researchers recruited into the first intake of the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada were leaving US institutions.
The programme is not a collection of separate provincial or hospital hiring packages. It is a coordinated federal initiative administered through Canada’s three federal research funding agencies. The Canadian government committed $504 million over eight years to the first 64 chairs, alongside more than $37 million to help institutions recruit 63 emerging research leaders.
The recruits span a wide research map rather than a narrow group of fields. Canada’s programme highlights work ranging from health and molecular imaging to engineering, sustainable transportation and Arctic research, while France’s first cohort is particularly concentrated in climate, biodiversity, health and life sciences.
Separately, disruption inside US government research programmes shows why funding stability has become part of international competition for scientists. In August, Reuters reported via The Guardian that two of three USDA projects studying the foodborne parasite cyclospora were being shuttered after Congress did not fund them, while the third remained funded but was due to move from Maryland to Iowa. USDA disputed that the research itself would be disrupted.
That episode is evidence of the wider uncertainty surrounding some US research programmes. It is not, however, evidence that the USDA scientists involved were among Canada’s 48 recruits, and there is no reliable basis for making that connection.
Why researchers are looking elsewhere
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president at the American Council on Education, told The PIE News that uncertainty around federal funding, changes to grant programmes and visa volatility were all affecting decisions by researchers. She also warned that the consequences extend beyond scientists who physically relocate: prospective students and postdoctoral researchers can decide to build their careers elsewhere before ever entering the US system.
That distinction matters. A tally of researchers who accept jobs in France or Canada captures only people whose moves are visible. It does not capture a doctoral candidate who chooses Europe instead of the United States, a postdoctoral researcher who moves into industry, or an international scientist who decides that another country’s funding environment looks more predictable.
The same reporting also includes a useful caution against treating every academic as highly mobile. Trinity College-Hartford professor Isaac Kamola noted that family obligations, limited job opportunities and chronic underfunding often make staying put the norm in academia. That makes the current recruitment numbers notable, but it does not make them evidence of a wholesale flight from US science.
What the recruits actually get
France’s model combines a host institution with national project funding and a route toward larger European grants. The intention is not simply to pay a researcher to relocate. It is to give that researcher enough institutional and financial support to establish a programme in France and then compete for longer-term European or international funding.
Canada’s structure is different but equally deliberate. Its research-chair scheme provides federal funding over eight years through Canadian institutions, with separate federal money available for emerging researchers and research infrastructure. The programme was launched as the centrepiece of a broader C$1.7 billion effort to attract international research talent.
The scale matters because laboratories are built around more than salary. Researchers considering an international move need funding continuity, equipment, institutional support and confidence that a project will survive long enough to produce results. France and Canada are competing on that wider package rather than simply offering a higher pay cheque.
Europe was already building its recruitment machinery
France was not acting alone, and Canada was not simply the next country in a two-step sequence. By June 2025, Times Higher Education was documenting a range of European programmes aimed at attracting international researchers, including France’s national initiative, the UK’s Faraday fellowships, a Norwegian recruitment programme and a €500 million European Commission effort to make Europe more attractive to researchers.
Those programmes differ in size and design, and they should not be treated as one coordinated migration pipeline. What they do show is that governments and research institutions were already treating scientific talent as something that could be actively recruited while US universities were dealing with funding and policy uncertainty.
The fields where policy matters most
The French cohort gives a clearer picture of where that competition is landing. Climate, biodiversity and sustainable-society research accounts for the largest share of the first group, followed by health and life sciences. The programme also covers space research, artificial intelligence, low-carbon energy, agriculture and digital infrastructure.
Biomedical research carries particular economic stakes because public research funding sits upstream of private investment, drug development and highly specialised jobs. In March 2026, Stephen Ezell, Sandra Barbosu and Esther Serger of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argued that Europe’s earlier loss of biopharmaceutical leadership was tied in part to policy choices that weakened incentives for research and innovation.
That history is not a direct analogue for today’s US university grant disputes. Europe’s biopharma shift involved drug pricing, regulation, investment incentives and other factors over decades. But the broader lesson is relevant: scientific leadership depends partly on whether researchers and institutions believe the policy environment will support long-term investment.
The historical comparison needs restraint
Scientific migration has repeatedly shaped national research systems, but the current figures do not justify comparisons with the mass movement of European scientists in the 1930s, nor do they establish that the United States is experiencing its first sustained scientific outflow since the Second World War.
What can be said with confidence is narrower. Governments that once competed mainly to attract globally mobile scientists are now explicitly marketing programmes to researchers based at US institutions, and they are backing those programmes with hundreds of millions in public funding.
What 41 and 48 actually mean
The 41 researchers arriving in France from US institutions and the 48 leaving US institutions for Canadian research chairs are still small numbers against the size of the American research system. They do not, by themselves, demonstrate a collapse in US scientific leadership.
They do demonstrate something more concrete: international competitors believe the present moment gives them an unusual opportunity to recruit people who might previously have expected to build their careers in the United States.
The French cohort also shows why the story cannot be reduced to senior laboratory heads carrying entire research teams overseas. Its recipients range from young post-PhD researchers to scientists with more than 30 years of experience. The talent competition is taking place across career stages.
Spreitzer’s concern about the people who never come to the United States may ultimately prove harder to measure than the visible departures. A researcher who accepts a chair in Canada produces a name and an announcement. A graduate student who quietly chooses another country instead produces no comparable headline.
The scoreboard, as of September 2026
France’s first Choose France for Science cohort contains 46 researchers, 41 coming from US institutions. Canada’s first Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs intake contains 64 researchers, 48 leaving US institutions. Both programmes sit alongside wider European and Canadian initiatives designed to recruit international scientific talent.
The important point is not that 89 researchers have suddenly overturned decades of American dominance in research. They have not. It is that France and Canada have converted concern about the US research environment into funded recruitment programmes with named recipients and multi-year commitments.
That makes the next numbers worth watching. If later French and Canadian intakes continue drawing heavily from US institutions, the story will become larger than two unusually successful recruitment rounds. For now, the evidence supports a more precise conclusion: the international competition for scientists has intensified, and US funding uncertainty has become part of the sales pitch.
