Why Ivy League professors are leaving Trump’s U.S. for Canada’s new $541-million research program - Toronto Star

AI researchers, Ivy League professors, and at least one winner of the MacArthur 'genius' grant will move to Canada from the U.S.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly will make the announcement Thursday.

OTTAWA — AI researchers, Ivy League professors, and at least one winner of the MacArthur “genius” grant will move to Canada from the U.S. with funds from the federal government’s research chair program, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly will announce Thursday, the Star has learned.  

At a news conference in Vancouver Thursday, Joly will announce that 64 professors will be coming to Canada under the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program. The government announced the $1 billion program last December to attract world-leading researchers with work that can be commercialized. 

Joly said it’s about getting top talent to Canadian schools.

“We have one of the biggest, if not the biggest, budgets in the Western world to attract talent. For a long time, we’ve been dealing with the impacts of brain drain. We’re now in brain gain mode,” she said ahead of the announcement. 

The program was named after Goldenberg, a former chief of staff to prime minister Jean Chrétien. The funding will pay not only for professor salaries, but also labs and staff. Joly said it has the potential to have a huge knock-on economic impact. 

“We will be able to position our universities as great magnets of talent, and we will be able not only to attract the different chairs that I’m talking about, the great scientists, but they will also be coming up with their labs, with their teams. With their families. And so that will change the lives of thousands of people across Canada,” she said. 

This first round of the program is awarding $541 million for the research chairs, with another intake expected in about six months. 

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The University of British Columbia will receive most of the new chairs, with nine positions, followed by the University of Ottawa with seven and the University of Toronto and McGill University, which are both bringing in six of the positions. 

Other Ontario universities to attract talent include McMaster with five positions, Waterloo with three, and Trent, Western, Guelph, Queen’s and Toronto Metropolitan University, which will all receive one of the chairs. 

According to the government’s data of the 64 new positions, 48 are researchers that are coming from American institutions, including researchers at Harvard, Yale, Duke, Cornell and MIT. The researchers are also coming from institutions in Europe and Asia, and 22 of the 64 are expat Canadians returning home. 

The Trump administration has sued or launched investigations into several Ivy League schools, freezing funding in many cases over the treatment of antisemitism on campus, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and international students. 

Joly said the universities took the opportunity of the new funding and brought in researchers with impressive resumés. 

“The universities have been fantastic. They’ve really gotten involved in attracting these talents,” she said.

The University of Toronto’s chairs include: Adrienne Campbell Washburn, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Joy Jiang from Washington University, who works on AI tools for health care and has launched several companies; Tanya Berger-Wolf, who studies AI for biodiversity; Michelle Arkin, a pharmaceutical researcher at the University of California; and Raymond Fisman, a behavioural economist from Boston University.

The University of Toronto has already announced that Sara Seager, an astrophysicist from MIT, is joining the school. She will be receiving one of the research chairs announced on Thursday. 

Seager studies exoplanets and has been a senior researcher on several NASA missions, as well as having been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work.

Ryan Tumilty is an Ottawa-based reporter covering Parliament Hill. Reach him at rtumilty@thestar.ca  and follow him on X: @ryantumilty.