Jason Walsman first moved to Pittsburgh in 2020 to take a research position at the University of Pittsburgh. He liked the region so much that when his next job offer came from the University of California Santa Barbara, he stayed in Pennsylvania to work remotely.
“We love Pittsburgh. We love the hills and the rivers and how there’s just random patches of forest everywhere,” Walsman said. “We have a lot of chosen family here in Pittsburgh and that has been really valuable to us.”
But the National Science Foundation declined to renew Walsman’s research funding this year. As a result, he’s trading the hills of Pittsburgh for the mostly flat terrain on the outskirts of Shanghai. He’s headed to Duke Kunshan University with his wife and two kids.
Walsman is one of a growing number of American researchers eyeing opportunities abroad amid cuts and shuffling priorities for federal research funding under the second Trump administration.
“The current funding climate for science … just didn’t feel at all safe to kind of gamble on that,” Walsman said. “Especially when there was a good job waiting for me in China.”
Walsman studies infectious diseases in amphibians and is working to find an intervention that could save certain frog species from extinction. Once he arrives at Duke Kunshan University, he’ll also study tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease in South Asia.
It’s hard to pin down just how many researchers are leaving the U.S. for Europe or Asia. But Walsman is certainly not alone, according to a nonprofit science advocacy group called Union of Concerned Scientists.
“[The U.S. is] a much more hostile place to do science now, unfortunately, and that’s leading many scholars to look elsewhere,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
More than 10,000 experts in science and related fields left their jobs at federal agencies last year, according to employment data from the White House Office of Personnel Management.
Congress fended off major cuts to science agencies proposed by the Trump administration last year, choosing instead to keep most funding flat. But the White House is once again pushing for significant cuts to those agencies this year, targeting those that fund or conduct research on health, space and the environment. Trump’s 2027 budget plan would maintain funding for artificial intelligence.
The message from the Trump administration appears to be that U.S. researchers need to learn how to do their work with less money from the federal government.
Meanwhile, China has taken the opposite approach. The country’s research spending has been growing for at least a decade, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The global policy organization recently published a report that found that when adjusted for purchasing power, China’s investment in research and development began outpacing the United States in 2024.
Still, some Trump officials deny that the federal government is disinvesting from science. National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya recently stressed at a press conference in Pittsburgh that his agency spent its entire budget, something he offered as evidence that “The U.S. is still the number one place in the world to do biomedical research.”
Bhattacharya had tough words for researchers considering leaving the U.S. to pursue science elsewhere.
“Any researcher that wants to move to China from the United States is making a foolish mistake,” Bhattacharya said. “They’re going to be at the whims of an essentially authoritarian government. Who knows if they’ll be able to do the research.”
For Walsman, that uncertainty is actually more apparent in the United States.
“One of the big reasons I’m moving to China is because of the volatility in what the government in the U.S. is and is not funding. There have been a lot of rapid changes,” he said. “That has made it very difficult to predict whether or not people will have funding to have jobs. That’s affected me personally.”
He added that while the research climate in the U.S. has driven him abroad, some scientists may leave the field altogether for a career with more predictability and stable funding.
“If someone’s paycheck doesn’t have some continuity or some certainty of where their paycheck’s coming from, they’re going to leave science or they’re going to go to another field or go to another job,” he said.
Goldman noted that the current uncertainty surrounding federal science spending has opened the door for other countries to recruit top talent.
“I think a lot of other countries see this as a really great opportunity because the U.S. has long … been the envy of the world in recruiting scientists from all around the world,” Goldman said. “We’re abdicating a lot of that leadership now with the gutting of federal research and the dismissal of federal scientists.”
She stressed that the impact of this global shift will not be something future leaders can reverse overnight.
“Even if we fund the scientific apparatus starting tomorrow fully, we’re going to see these consequences for years and years to come because of the disruption that’s already happened,” Goldman said. “[There are] multi-decade health studies that have been disrupted. That’s science we can’t get back.”
