Three years into his postdoctoral research on pancreatic and breast cancer, Ilias Tzelepis felt he was only months away from a breakthrough. He had been studying how these cancers operate at the molecular level to uncover new targets for treatment at University of Pennsylvania (Penn).
That was until last year, when he was called into his supervisor’s office and told that the White House had frozen $175 million in Penn research grants. Without restored funding, the lab would no longer be able to afford to keep him. His supervisor immediately urged him to look for positions outside the US.
Originally from Greece, Tzelepis was living in the United States on an H-1B visa. He remembers university administrators emailing international students and employees like himself, urging them to carry immigration documents at all times and avoid international travel.
A month later, Tzelepis was called back into his advisor’s office. Funding had still not been restored. The lab had no choice but to let him go. At that point his research project was 90 percent finished and only months away from publication, an essential step toward achieving his long-term goal of becoming a professor. He had no choice but to leave his work incomplete and unpublished.
“My academic career is over,” Tzelepis recalled thinking as he walked out of his supervisor’s office.
As he packed up his apartment and prepared to move across the Atlantic, Tzelepis sent out emails to labs across the country and around the world, frantically searching for a way to salvage his career. Most American labs never replied. The few that did explained that they were not in a position to hire given “the current situation.”
Tzelepis is one of about 25,000 scientists who lost their positions following Donald Trump’s return to office. The new administration canceled 7,840 research grants, according to Grant Witness, a project that analyzes data from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The work these grants once supported ranges from cancer cures to environmental research.
Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has presided over a radical dismantlement of the research establishment, cutting funding, revoking grants, firing advisors, and tightening immigration protocols for visiting academics. This attack on science has resulted in a loss of national scientific talent, according to researchers.
The contraction of research funding in the United States has presented other countries with the opportunity to recruit the scientists America pushed away. One country that has taken a strong initiative to capitalize on this shift is Germany.
Cancer researcher Ilias Tzelepis is among thousands of scientists who have been forced out of their positions at American universities and institutes since Donald Trump took office in 2025. Tzelepis found work in Germany via the Humboldt Foundation and recently attended its annual meeting in Berlin.
Kalohe Danbara
By the time Tzelepis’ life was in boxes back beneath his parents’ roof in Greece, a lifeline arrived. He had been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation, a German research funding organization that promotes international academic collaboration.
“I was screaming,” said Tzelepis. “My life was back on track suddenly.”
Germany’s Warm Welcome to International Scientists
In July 2025, just after Trump slashed much of the country’s research funding, the German government launched the Global Minds Initiative, working with the Humboldt Foundation to attract researchers from around the world—including those who might otherwise have remained in the United States.
Almost a year after its launch, in July 2026, scientists, university leaders, and politicians gathered at The Free University of Berlin for the Humboldt Foundation’s annual meeting, held every summer in Berlin, to discuss science diplomacy and academic freedom.
The welcome address was given by Dorothee Bär, Germany’s Minister of Research, Technology and Space. She explained that the decline of academic freedom, in parts of the world that once cherished it, was the reason Germany launched the Global Minds Initiative.
“We are sending a message to the global research community,” said Bär. “I want to say it loud and clear: You are welcome here.”
More than 80,000 international scientists now work in Germany, making it the second most popular destination for scientists after the United States, she said.
“We must stand up for academic freedom because it makes our country really, really powerful.”
After the welcome speeches concluded, Robert Schlögl, the president of the Humboldt Foundation discussed offstage why he believes the United States’ position as the premier destination for research and academia is declining.
Humboldt Foundation President Robert Schlögl delivers speech at the non-profit’s annual meeting in Berlin. He pledged Germany’s dedication to academic “freedom,” without funding pressure.
Kalohe Danbara
“There are many people who think there’s no more American dream,” said Schlögl. He touched his glasses with concern and, after a pause, added, “That is something that has sunk deep into the minds of the young scientists.”
When scientists come to Germany, they are often surprised that they have the freedom to choose their research topics without worrying about funding, he said.
“Here, we are not big, but we really have freedom.”
The Dulling of America’s Competitive Research Edge
Germany is not the only country recruiting top talent from the United States; China is a deep-pocketed competitor. But there is historical irony about the flight to Germany, given that thousands of top German scientists relocated to the United States in the 1930s after Adolf Hitler dismantled the democratically elected Weimar Republic. Most famously, Albert Einstein renounced his German citizenship and settled at Princeton University after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Others include the top physicists and chemists who worked on the Manhattan Project and created the atom bomb.
Erin Kavanagh, an American biomedical researcher who moved to Munich, said she only appreciated how profoundly her country has changed under the second Trump administration after moving to Germany.
“I went to Germany, and as I was leaving, I remember feeling a very strong sentiment that history was somehow repeating itself, especially in the context of the Weimar Republic,” said Kavanagh.
International research fellows who have moved to Germany gathered in July 2026 at the Free University of Berlin.
Kalohe Danbara
Americans are concerned. In a press statement, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth said that the university has seen clear signs that policy changes affecting international students and scholars have discouraged “extremely talented individuals” from applying. Kornbluth called it a “loss for the nation,” explaining that “when you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures—and you shrink the supply of future scientists.”
American climate scientist Benjamin Tiger, another attendee of the Humboldt Foundation’s annual meeting who had recently left the United States for Germany, said, “We are losing our competitive edge.” Tiger applied for the Humboldt fellowship before Trump’s return to office while finishing his PhD at MIT. But watching MIT’s federal research awards decline by 20 percent played a role in his decision to leave the country for his postdoctoral research. He now works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.
Among the night’s attendees was Tzelepis, who had then been living in Germany for nine months. He wore a navy polo shirt and khaki slacks, with a lanyard hanging around his neck identifying his country of origin and field of study.
Perhaps he would have rather been in Philadelphia, but he was grateful to have landed in Germany, he said. He now lives in Göttingen, a quaint city in Lower Saxony with cobbled streets, timbered houses, and a major research university.
“If it wasn’t for the Humboldt fellowship in Germany, I don’t know where I would be right now,” Tzelepis said, reflecting on the past year. “It saved my career.”
Though Tzelepis was able to salvage his career by moving to Germany, the damage caused by the budget cuts remains. The cancer research he spent three years on in the United States is still unpublished. He is separated from the partner he had planned to marry, and boxes of belongings he could not take with him remain stored at friends’ houses.
The cuts risk driving away skilled American researchers, while stricter policies for international students drive away global talent that might otherwise have chosen to study in the United States. American universities are already feeling the consequences.
On Considering a Return to the US
On the second day of the annual Humboldt meeting, scientists gathered again, this time in the courtyard of the Humboldt Forum, a reconstructed Baroque palace on Museum Island in Berlin’s Mitte district. Schlögl introduced German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The crowd cheered as he took the podium.
German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (left) and Humboldt Foundation President Robert Schlögl (right) walk together. The German government has funded the Global Minds Initiative to attract scientists.
Kalohe Danbara
“Research cooperation with certain countries has become significantly more difficult; and even the world's most important scientific hub, the US, is currently characterized by state paternalism,” said Steinmeier addressing the crowd of scientists in German. “That it has gotten to this point most of us, including myself, could not have imagined only a few years ago.”
In the audience was Kavanagh, who glanced at her partner at this remark. She was pleasantly surprised that he called out the United States directly. Though speakers throughout the three-day annual meeting—from scientists to university faculty to politicians—indirectly addressed the decline of scientific support and freedom in the United States, few mentioned the country by name.
After earning her PhD at Johns Hopkins University, Kavanagh moved to Munich for a postdoctoral fellowship at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Hospital Munich. At Johns Hopkins University, she spent four years in a biomedical engineering lab working on artificial lung technology for cystic fibrosis. At LMU, her postdoctoral work builds on that research, but instead of targeting the lungs, she works on genetic cardiac diseases.
“Germany is not only trying to attract people that no longer want to stay as US citizens,” said Kavanagh. “They're now also attracting the people that the US is going to miss because of the rhetoric that has been built up around immigration and around the type of research that is allowed to be conducted.”
Whenever Kavanagh told peers she was moving out of the United States after her PhD, she heard the same response: “That’s a smart idea.” Trump took office during the final year of her PhD, and postdoctoral opportunities were becoming scarce and fiercely competitive.
Humboldt Foundation president Robert Schlögl, second from right in the front row, poses with Foundation fellowship recipients at a July 2026 event in Berlin. The non-profit is helping scholars relocate from the US to Germany.
Kalohe Danbara
She is unsure whether she will return to the United States after completing her fellowship.
“Even if this administration leaves in two years, there is a ripple effect—a tarnish—on the international reputation of the US as leading biomedical research,” said Kavanagh. “It is especially unfortunate because this will have ripple effects not only in the funding scheme for future projects, and high impact clinical trials, but also in terms of the scientists that they get.”
Tzelepis grapples with the same question of whether he would return to the United States. He feels traumatized by the events of the past year, from worrying about his visa and immigration status to being forced to leave with only a few months’ notice.
Back in 2025 when he lost his research position, his mind raced about how to break the news to his partner and family, but he returned to the lab and finished out the day’s work.
As the initial shock faded, another emotion surprised him: relief.
Losing his job and the visa tied to it were devastating blows to the career he had spent more than a decade building. But at least now, he was free to leave the country and visit his family.
He still remembers how supported he felt in his career before the change in administration.
“There would have to be a new government, a new president that would tell me, ‘Look, the US is not about disrespecting scientists. It’s not about disrespecting immigrants,’” Tzelepis said, on considering whether he would move back.
Translation disclosure: German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier's quote was translated from German into English independently by two native German speakers and cross-referenced with Google Translate to ensure its accuracy.
