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How Canada Gains from America’s Brain Drain

A $1.7 billion federal program is attracting leading minds from Harvard, MIT, and more

Sara Seager, a Toronto-born astronomer, left Canada for Harvard and eventually became a professor at MIT, where she built a career searching for chemical signs of life beyond Earth. She went on to win a MacArthur “genius grant” and the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. Now, she’s back home.

A new academic program is attracting leading researchers to Canada

Canada is investing in research areas the US is actively censoring under the Trump administration

In the first wave, sixty-four researchers will start work at twenty-one different universities

Seager is one of sixty-four researchers selected in the first wave of the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program, the centrepiece of a new $1.7 billion federal program designed to attract some of the world’s leading researchers to Canada (or, in the case of several of the chairholders, return to Canada), over twelve years.

The timing of this investment is hard to separate from what is happening south of the border. For decades, the United States was the obvious destination for researchers seeking enormous budgets and prestigious universities. That advantage is still very real—US research and development spending remains one of the highest in the world—but the Donald Trump administration is undermining it. The government has cut billions of dollars in federal research funding, suspended thousands of grants, and aggressively targeted topics such as equity, diversity, and inclusion (or EDI); mRNA vaccines; and misinformation.

For Canada, Trump’s war on facts presents a window of opportunity. “As other countries constrain academic freedoms and undermine cutting-edge research, Canada is investing in—and doubling down on—science,” Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said when announcing the initiative in December 2025.

The recipients come from thirteen countries including the United Kingdom, France, Australia, India, and China. The vast majority, 75 percent of the cohort, will come from the US, leaving elite institutions........

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