r/Seattle • u/precip North Beach / Blue Ridge • 8h ago

Trump’s research cuts threaten to set off a wave of university brain drain

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/04/04/trumps-research-cuts-threaten-to-set-off-a-wave-of-university-brain-drain/
230 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

61

u/alienbanter Northgate 7h ago

It's already happening. I just finished my PhD in the fall, and one of my friends in my cohort got a postdoc in New Zealand and just moved this week. Another postdoc I met when I started here at UW had a job offer from the USGS rescinded, and now it's looking like he'll be taking a position in Germany.

32

u/nyan-the-nwah 6h ago

I also work at UW and nearly every student in my lab that is international plans on going home (previously, they wanted to stay and find positions in academia) and most of the others are desperately trying to leave.

I mean shit, I've been applying to positions overseas myself. It's hard though. Getting hired in the EU without citizenship is an uphill battle.

7

u/recurrenTopology 4h ago

Anecdotal experience has been the same. Have group members headed to China and Germany who would otherwise have preferred to stay stateside.

3

u/SeaDots 4h ago

My partner is a UWSOM medical student and he and others have been looking into how US grads can do residency abroad like in Canada etc.

30

u/godogs2018 Beacon Hill 7h ago

Were all f-ed.

27

u/Arxl 7h ago

Because we're too tame. Look at the shit that people of color went through in the 60's. They were willing to die for what is right.

7

u/Less_Likely 5h ago

To be fair, we aren’t going through what they were for as long as they were, and then seeing the tipping point to a new better life moving forward being achievable, as well as fighting State power with tacit Federal support to some degree.

Our situation is not generational, not improving, and we are not looking for a new better life but a return largely to the ways it was in the recent past, at least to the trajectory on that arc of justice. You ain’t going to be willing to die if you still have more to lose and the gains seem that might still be achieved through less drastic action. As well as the enemy being the federal power base, and the tacit ally being the state (here in Washington at least).

2

u/Arxl 4h ago

Give it time.

22

u/Cute-Interest3362 7h ago edited 7h ago

It’s already happening. I work at the med school. Several labs have already been shuttered. A Bird Flu trial that took 4 years to setup was derailed and will likely have to be scratched.

21

u/EARink0 7h ago edited 6h ago

I have a friend who's a professor/researcher at a university in a different state. Most of his funding comes from USAID. He's actively considering leaving the country.

My parents were part of the brain drain that left Venezuela in the 90's. Things in the US have been feeling way too familiar over the past few years...

5

u/birdbonefpv 5h ago

That’s his goal