On Sept. 8, 2026, Science funding cuts in the United States have led many researchers to seek out research opportunities in Germany.

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 He had no choice but to leave his work incomplete and unpublished.

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.

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.

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.