(Science|Business) US-based ERC winners count the reasons for returning to Europe

For the original publication, please click here.

The European Research Council (ERC) Starting grants have been particularly popular among US-based researchers this year, with 170 eligible applications compared to 113 in 2025 and 58 in 2024. The 20 winners from the US are now making plans to relocate to Europe, as they must to collect the funding, or are already settling into their new labs.

While the chance to escape the limitations placed on US science by Donald Trump is a part of the motivation for some winners, it is the generosity of the ERC Starting grants in time and money that is the main draw. Successful applicants get up to €1.5 million for a period of five years, and the freedom to pursue whatever ambitious ideas in frontier research they choose. 

“Most of us want to attack those questions, but often avoid doing so due to the current organisation of academia,” said Maxime Maheu, a French neuroscientist who has recently returned to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from Boston University, where he was working temporarily on a global Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship. He will take up his ERC Starting grant at the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience. 

“My move was motivated not only by the freedom to pursue the fundamental questions I find most important, but also by the stability needed to give myself a real chance of answering them,” he added.

The same logic motivated Belgian theoretical physicist Andreas Blommaert, who will exchange a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey for the Free University of Brussels (VUB). “I now have a permanent position and ERC funding to build a group around me,” he said. “This provides me with the freedom and stability to develop my research vision.”

The opportunities for doing that in the US have always been limited. “In places like Princeton and Harvard, there is always money to hire,” Blommaert said. “Outside of that, the funding situation in Europe is better, in particular because of the ERC.”

German neuroscientist Fabian Voigt, however, thinks the situation has become worse under Trump. “I’ve been on the academic job market in the US for the past two years and have seen multiple job opportunities evaporate, mostly due to hiring freezes as the current administration came into power,” he said. In particular, aggressive fiscal and administrative clawbacks have forced some principal investigators to downsize or even retire early. “One of the first things that goes out of the window under such circumstances is the willingness to do risky science.”

Thanks to the ERC Starting grant, Voigt will exchange a postdoctoral position at Harvard for his own group at the Max Planck Centre for Physics and Medicine and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, both in Erlangen. “The Max Planck Society and its network of research-focused institutes is quite unique and there’s no equivalent in the US,” he said. “For example, group leaders do not have a teaching load, but can concentrate on research, another aspect that helps pursuing risky ideas.”

The research opportunity was also the main motivation for Charles Roques-Carmes, a French physicist and engineer who moved to the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in June after ten years in the US, mostly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. 

“From day one, ISTA offered me independence as a tenure-track faculty member, a generous start-up package and the resources to build a laboratory from scratch with state-of-the-art equipment,” he said. Beyond that, “ISTA offers extremely competitive salaries by European standards, and still very competitive ones compared with the US, particularly once cost of living is taken into account.”

Salaries and careers

Salary is the measure where Europe most often compares poorly with the US. For example, Blommaert will take a significant pay cut in moving back to Belgium. “My current salary is about $6,300 per month, next year it will be about €4,000,” he said. “However, salaries in Belgium rise quite well with seniority, so eventually a full professor salary is certainly competitive.”

According to Voigt, however, the salary difference is “not that large” for early-career researchers, especially when comparing the US with strong research ecosystems such as Germany and Switzerland, but the gap generally widens as scientists advance from entry-level roles to senior leadership.

Where Europe has an edge is the speed at which an academic career can advance. In the US, it can take up to 15 years for a young researcher to find a permanent position, including a six-year probationary period in a tenure-track role. By contrast, Maheu expects to be recruited on a permanent basis much earlier. “Despite the lower salaries and the heavier administrative duties, France continues to attract researchers for that very reason,” he said.

There are, of course, other reasons for returning from the US. 

“I was born in Flanders,” Blommaert said. “I do like life in the US, but I am at least equally happy to live back in Belgium.” But then practical matters also come into play. “I would not have taken an ERC grant in any country other than Belgium and the UK,” he went on. “And in terms of hiring people using the ERC funding, the overhead in the UK is much higher, so scientifically Belgium makes a lot of sense.”

It also helps that the country has introduced measures to reduce the cost of employing qualified foreign talent, including up to a 35% tax-free allowance for inbound researchers. 

And however successful the latest round of the ERC Starting grants has been in attracting researchers back from the US, the EU shouldn't rest on its laurels.

“Europe should not only count on instability in other countries to attract and retain young researchers,” Maheu said. “It should also invest in transformative policies that profoundly reshape the organisation of research in the EU.”