Ten scientists left the US and UK for China so far in 2026, and a Nobel winner leads the list

Ten scientists have left the US and UK for China in 2026, led by Nobel chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi, who moved to Tsinghua University. The exodus is driven by US federal funding cuts, including thousands of canceled NIH and NSF grants, and China's offer of larger lab budgets and autonomy. This brain drain threatens Western scientific leadership as China aggressively recruits top talent.

A Nobel chemistry laureate now runs a Beijing lab. A neurobiologist swapped San Diego for Shenzhen. The exodus of scientific talent from the West to China has a name attached to it this year, and the list keeps growing. Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry while at the University of California, Berkeley. He's since left for Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he's building a new AI-assisted materials discovery institute from scratch. Nature and the South China Morning Post both confirmed the move this year, and it's arguably the single biggest name on a list that has been quietly lengthening since January. The Post has now counted ten scientists and experts who left American or British institutions for China in 2026 alone, and dozens more have made the same move in smaller, less publicized ways. Yaghi's departure lands at an awkward moment for US science funding. According to the Brennan Center for Justice and NPR, the Trump administration has canceled or suspended 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants this year. NIH issued 66 percent fewer grant awards in the first months of 2026 than it did over the same period last year, and the NSF has moved to cut a quarter to half of its own workforce, with 168 staff let go on February 18. That's not a hypothetical chilling effect. It's grant officers watching their programs disappear and researchers deciding not to wait around to see what happens next. Chih-Ying Su is the case that got the most attention on Chinese social media. She was faculty vice-chair at UC San Diego, running a lab that studies how fruit flies and mosquitoes process smell, work with direct relevance to disease control. She's now at the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences. The Post's profile leaned on an unlikely detail: Su was a college taekwondo team captain before she was a neurobiologist, the kind of specific, human fact that no press release would think to include. Ling Haibin built the first mobile app that could identify a plant from a photograph, a tool now used by millions of amateur botanists and gardeners worldwide. He's left his US post for a full-time role at Westlake University in Hangzhou, the private research university that has become one of China's most aggressive recruiters of returning and foreign-trained scientists. A semiconductor packaging specialist who spent more than two decades at UC Irvine has taken a position at a conductive materials firm in eastern China. Zhu Ziqiang, an expert in electrical machines and control systems, joined Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a chair professor. Each of them had tenure, funding, and a lab already built. Each decided the trade was worth it anyway. China isn't subtle about why it wants them. Tsinghua and Westlake both offer lab budgets, staffing, and startup packages that US public universities, squeezed by state legislatures and now by federal cuts, increasingly can't match. Beijing has also made a specific pitch to Chinese-born academics: come home, and you'll lead your own program rather than serve as a junior collaborator on someone else's grant. For scientists who spent years as postdocs and mid-level faculty in the US immigration pipeline, that offer carries weight the salary numbers alone don't capture. The pull isn't only about money, and it isn't only about China, either. The UK has its own version of this story. Early-career researchers there increasingly cite shrinking research council funding and a tightening geopolitical climate around China-linked collaboration as reasons to look elsewhere, according to reporting picked up by the South China Morning Post and India.com. Britain isn't losing scientists to China at Yaghi's altitude yet. But the complaints sound familiar: not enough money, not enough autonomy, not enough certainty that the lab will still be funded next year. None of this proves the US or UK have lost their edge in science permanently. Universities in both countries still train more of the world's top researchers than China does, and grant fights in Washington have a habit of reversing course, as they did when Congress rejected Trump's proposed 57 percent cut to the NSF earlier this year. But Yaghi didn't wait for that fight to resolve, and neither did Su, Ling, or the seven others on the Post's list. They looked at what was actually being funded, not what was being promised, and they moved. That's the number worth tracking through the rest of 2026: not how many grants get restored, but how many more names get added to that list. 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