Canada poaches dozens of top US researchers for its universities

ByNadine Yousif, Senior Canada reporter and Nardine Saad.

Key points

• Canada's Industry Minister Melanie Joly remarked on Thursday the administration was "very glad that these fantastic professors are coming".
• Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, remarked institutions feel "helpless" in the face of federal and state cuts.
• Steven Lamy, a professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, argued that major grant agencies "have been cut and politicised" by the current US administration.
• Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, believed the funding cuts were "a generational disaster for science and scientists".
• More than three-fourths of the 64 professors who are moving to Canada from worldwide will come from the US.

Canada is hiring dozens of researchers away from US universities, including top research institutions such as Harvard as its relationship with its neighbour continues to sour.

More than three-fourths of the 64 professors who are moving to Canada from worldwide will come from the US. Under a new administration programme, they'll receive funding from a pool of C$504m ($362m; £268m) for research in fields such as climate change and medicine.

US President Donald Trump's administration has accused universities of being dominated by left-wing ideology and diversity policies, and of failing to tackle alleged campus antisemitism. The BBC contacted the White House and US Department of Education.

Meanwhile, the administration has additionally frozen federal research grants for numerous different institutions and groups that they have argued are wasteful, external. That uncertainty is helping lure researchers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Canada is asserting itself more on the global stage while it pushes back against the US in their escalating trade war. It reached a major turning point over tariffs lately.

One climate researcher informed the BBC he was relocating to Canada in part as his work in the US had become more tough over recent years.

Seth Guikema, a climate resiliency researcher at the University of Michigan and one of the 48 US researchers relocating to Canada, remarked he decided to approach Canadian institutions last year in search of opportunities.

"The funding environment in the US for anything related to climate and resilience has become challenging, " Guikema remarked. "I was looking for a good intellectual home where I could have practical impact."

Over the next eight years, Guikema remarked he would apply C$8m to research tools for better preparing for natural hazards, like storms and wildfires, at the University of Western Ontario. The University of Michigan, his former employer, declined to comment.

Asked if the programme was poaching US talent and whether it could be viewed by the Trump administration as an escalation of the US-Canada trade war, she remarked on Thursday: "The US administration is taking its own decisions and we're taking ours."

Some of the researchers chosen for the programme, like Guikema, were born and raised in the US. Others are Canadians who worked abroad and are now returning home.

Peter Caravan, who worked for two decades as a biopharmaceutical researcher and professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, appeared emotional at a Thursday news conference announcing the research appointments.

Caravan is researching how illnesses like cancers and chronic diseases can be better detected – work that will now be done out of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

"All of a sudden employment offers from external universities are attractive, " he remarked.

She informed the BBC that Canada had offered a "far more welcoming environment" for academics.

US universities are still among the top ranked in the world, according to QS Universities Rankings, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford and Harvard in the top five.

For context, the deeper concern, she continued, "is not the short-term brain drain", but "the possibility that the US could become less attractive as a place to pursue knowledge".

Taken together, the developments around canada poaches dozens of top US researchers for its universities point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.