ISTOCK, DNY59On June 23, 2016, the UK electorate voted 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent to leave the European Union. As a community, scientists were overwhelmingly opposed to leaving: a Nature poll from March of that year showed that 83 percent of UK researchers were pro-remain, and only 12 percent pro-leave—the rest being undecided.
As Britain tries to work out the details of its exit, or Brexit, U.K.-based researchers speak to The Scientist about what the referendum result has meant for them.
“It’s thrown a spanner in the works.”
A British and Australian passport holder, Tom Johnstone, the head of brain imaging at the University of Reading, credits the U.K.’s “top notch” research university system as a major factor in his decision to settle in England a decade ago. But a year on from the referendum, he’s already seeing untoward effects on that system.
The result has complicated a multi-institution grant consortium that Johnstone has been working on for years to secure funding for doctoral training and research in neuroscience. Due to uncertainty about the U.K.’s post-Brexit capacity to ...
