MUNICH — Dr. Jonathan Reyes moved his neuroscience laboratory from Baltimore to Munich in March with 11 freezers of tissue samples, four postdoctoral researchers and a five-year grant from the German government that he described as “larger than anything I would have gotten at home, with a quarter of the paperwork to get it and four times the paperwork after.”
Dr. Reyes is one of 210 researchers recruited under a federal program, launched last year with 1.2 billion euros, to attract scientists from the United States and other countries where research funding has been cut or politicized. The program, run by the German Research Foundation with the Max Planck Society and the country’s universities, offers chairs with guaranteed funding for five to seven years, startup grants of up to 5 million euros for laboratories and, unusually for Germany, salaries negotiated outside the civil service pay scale.
Figures released this week show 3,800 applications in the program’s first 18 months, of which about 60 percent came from researchers at American institutions, 15 percent from Britain and the rest from a dozen countries. The 210 appointed so far are concentrated in life sciences, climate science, computing and the social sciences. A further 150 offers are outstanding.
“We set out to recruit a few dozen stars and found that the pool was far deeper than that,” said Prof. Ute Wagner, who directs the program in Bonn. The applicants, she said, were not mainly senior figures seeking a comfortable final post but researchers in their 30s and 40s with grants that had been canceled or laboratories that had lost staff. “They are not fleeing. They are looking for somewhere they can plan five years ahead.”
Germany spends about 3.1 percent of its economic output on research, among the highest in Europe, and has long competed for talent with a mixed record. Its universities pay professors less than American ones, its rules on hiring and tenure are rigid, and the proportion of foreign-born professors, about 15 percent, is well below that of Britain or Switzerland. Prof. Wagner said the program had required waivers from the finance ministry on pay and from the states on hiring procedures, and that the greater difficulty was what happened after arrival.
Dr. Reyes described six months of appointments to register his residence, obtain a tax number, open a bank account and enroll his children in school, and a university procurement office that required three quotes for a microscope available from a single manufacturer. “The science is magnificently funded,” he said. “The experience of being a human being in the system is designed to make you give up.” His postdocs, two of whom are Indian citizens, waited four months for visas.
Prof. Wagner said the foundation was funding “welcome offices” at 24 universities to handle residence permits, housing and schools, and had asked the interior ministry for a fast-track visa for researchers’ staff. She acknowledged that the program’s harder test would come in 2030, when the first chairs expire and the universities must absorb their costs. “If we have simply paid for five good years and then watched them go to Zurich, we will have done something, but not what we promised,” she said.
Dr. Reyes said he intended to stay. “My daughter speaks German now and corrects mine,” he said. “That is more binding than any contract.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 13 of the European edition with the headline: Germany’s Bid to Lure Scientists From America Has Filled 210 Chairs. Keeping Them Is the Next Test..
