Top US scientists come to NL amid threats to academic freedom

Most of the 34 leading scientists coming to the Netherlands through a new €50 million research fund are moving from the United States, the education ministry and science funding body NWO said on Tuesday.

The Tulip Fund was set up last year to attract top researchers from outside the EU, partly in response to growing threats against academic freedom by foreign governments like the Trump administration.

Of the first 34 researchers selected, 29 are American or work in the US, at institutions including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and Yale and federal bodies such as the National Cancer Institute.

The others are moving from Israel, Turkey, Britain and Singapore. Their fields include artificial intelligence, quantum technology, vaccines, nuclear energy, cancer, Alzheimer’s, climate and food production – all top priorities for the Netherlands, said NWO.

First arrivals
Among the first arrivals is astrophysicist Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who is moving from Vanderbilt University to space research institute SRON in Leiden to continue her work on gravitational waves.

The Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is taking on two researchers: Harvard cell biologist Miguel Gonzalez Lozano, whose research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of brain disorders, and legal scholar Itamar Mann, on leave from the University of Haifa in Israel.

Not all the names have been made public, partly because some researchers’ current employers have not yet been told they are leaving, the Volkskrant reported.|

Academic freedom
MPs first called for a fund to help researchers in the US, after the Trump administration cut research funding and put universities under political pressure. Then education minister Eppo Bruins asked NWO to set it up in March 2025.

Although helping threatened scientists was the rationale, the fund’s conditions do not explicitly require that researchers be held back or at risk in their work. NWO said it would be a difficult thing to categorise and that institutions can take all details into account.

De Jonge Akademie, an association of young scientists, warned last year that the fund could end up recruiting academic stars who are not under threat, at a time when Dutch universities were cutting jobs because of government cutbacks. The new cabinet reversed those cuts last month, pledging up to €428 million a year extra for research.