Three Harvard Researchers Leave for Canadian Universities Amid Funding Struggles

Three current and former Harvard researchers are heading north to Canadian universities as part of a sweeping $1.21 billion government effort to recruit top academic talent, with two citing instability in the United States’ research and political climate under the second Trump administration as driving factors.

The Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program, which spearheads the initiative, pledged more than $350 million over eight years to 64 researchers, 48 of whom were recruited from the U.S., to advance research in priority areas such as climate change, molecular biology, and transportation.

The group includes Harvard School of Public Health associate professor Curtis Huttenhower, former Kennedy School Arctic Initiative director Jennifer Spence, and Harvard Medical School professor Peter Caravan.

Huttenhower, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics, will join the University of British Columbia in summer 2027. After 17 years at Harvard, he plans to launch a new microbiome science research center at UBC.

Though his lab was not targeted by grant freezes to Harvard last year, Huttenhower said that the restructuring of federal funding framework under the second Trump administration has had a more adverse effect on Harvard than people outside affected labs might assume.

“Once the infrastructure for federal funding and the pipelines for things like trainees or incoming faculty are disrupted, it’s difficult to recover from that institutionally,” he said.

Huttenhower added that the disruption has fallen hardest on graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

“As much as the federal funding disruptions have caused problems for faculty, the problems for trainees are heartbreakingly more difficult, and nobody should have to go through that on a sort of day-to-day basis when they’re just trying to start their career,” he said.

For Spence, whose initiative focused on informing policymaking on the impacts of climate change and geopolitics on Arctic communities, funding was not a primary reason for leaving. The initiative is largely supported by private grants, but Spence said the political climate in the U.S. increasingly complicated her work.

“A lot of the things that we were focused on were either difficult to talk about in the U.S. context or sort of politically charged in the current context,” Spence said. “I spent a lot of time fielding media requests to explain the Greenland situation, for example, when I was hoping to be focused more on communicating important messages around the impacts of climate change.”

Spence, who was born in Canada and previously planned to settle permanently in the U.S., said the program would let her better collaborate with international colleagues who were previously unwilling to travel to the U.S.

“I had colleagues in different places that were quite clear that they would not travel to the United States,” Spence said.

“I feel ironically that I’m better positioned to support the team that I was working with at Harvard from Canada,” she added.

Both researchers said the financial and institutional support offered by their new Canadian institutions helped draw them north.

“The Goldenberg program, in particular, is one of many global programs that are, in some ways, helping people who are affected by that to continue their work more securely elsewhere,” Huttenhower said.

Spence and Huttenhower both described leaving their Harvard teams as bittersweet. Spence hopes to continue collaborating with the Arctic Initiative while in Canada.

“I made the choice to be here, but I also can make the choice to leave,” Spence said. “And that’s what I did.”

—Staff writer Riya S. Shah can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at riyas.23. Follow her on X @RiyaShah233.

—Staff writer Juliana L. Yao can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at jly.87. Follow her on X @JulianaYao298.