CHAPEL HILL (July 18, 2025) – As the United States reduces investments in scientific research, our competitors around the globe are taking notice – and looking to poach our talent.
“When faculty investigators and top talent see that they may not be able to sustain their research in the U.S., it creates a competitive bid for those faculty,” Dr. Penny Gordon-Larsen, Vice Chancellor for Research at UNC-Chapel Hill, says in the accompanying video.
“So we are seeing China and the EU come after our top talent.”
THE EUROPEAN UNION has created a €500 million campaign – half a billion euros – called Choose Europe for Science to lure foreign researchers. France has separately pledged €100 million to an effort called Choose France for Science.
“Unfortunately … the role of science in today’s world is questioned. The investment in fundamental, free, and open research is questioned,” EU President Ursula von der Leyen said as she and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the campaigns in May.
“What a gigantic miscalculation.”
Von der Leyen and Macron were backed by a display that was notably printed in English, with “Europe” highlighted in yellow.
Though she didn’t mention the United States by name, Europe is “choosing to place research and innovation, science and technology at the heart of our economy,” Von der Leyen said.1
IN CHAPEL HILL, UNC has succeeded in retaining its faculty so far, Gordon-Larsen says.
“But I think all of America is concerned about this, because it will jeopardize the discoveries that we make, our national security, our financial future if we lose our talent in this way,” she says.
“The United States is shooting itself in the foot,” Zhang Xiaoming, an anatomy expert who left the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas last year to lead medical education at Westlake University, a research university in Hangzhou, told The New York Times.
In 2020, the Times reported, nearly one-fifth of PhDs awarded in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the United States went to students from China, according to the National Science Foundation.
The erosion is measurable.
Historically, the vast majority of those PhDs stayed in the United States — 87% between 2005 and 2015. Many became U.S. citizens. They have helped the United States garner patents, publications and Nobel Prizes.
But in recent years, more scientists have returned to China, drawn in part by programs promising millions of dollars in research funds as well as housing subsidies and other amenities.
China’s spending on research and development is now second only to the United States. Institutions such as Tsinghua and Zhejiang University now rank among the best in the world for science and technology.
“If they cut so much funding, I believe that may be the last straw for many people,” Lu Wuyuan, a protein chemist formerly at the University of Maryland but now at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Times.2
Hunan province gives $140,000 to doctoral students who come there from other countries.
For U.S. scientists who now think of moving, Yanbo Wang, a science policy researcher at the University of Hing Kong, told the journal Nature, “The Trump administration has made that decision much, much easier than ever before.”3
1 https://www.science.org/content/article/europe-pledges-€600-million-lure-foreign-researchers-vows-protect-scientific-freedom.
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-visa-china.html.
3 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-europe-us-scientists.
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