It all started promisingly enough. French biologist Gabriela Lobinska had enjoyed her Ph.D. training, researching how organisms change over time. Arriving at Harvard Medical School in September 2024, she hoped for more of the same. She planned to look at how, over the course of a lifetime, healthy cells change into diseased ones.
Donald Trump won the presidential election shortly after her arrival, and before long, things went downhill. In the spring, the grant paying her salary—along with thousands of others—was cut. In April, the White House proposed cutting by 40% the budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the country. Then the government withdrew Harvard’s ability to provide visas for international researchers like Lobinska. While a court allowed Harvard to sponsor visas for the time being, Lobinska was questioning why she was in the U.S. “There are places where I could go to do science,” she recalls thinking, “without all this.”
Soon she had a job offer from AITHYRA, a new institute for biomedicine and AI in Vienna. And when she heard of a new Austrian fellowship called APART-USA—specifically for people leaving American institutions, with a generous four years of research funding—she applied, and got it.
Now, she lives in the city where, before Vienna’s scientific community was devastated by World Wars I and II, blood types were discovered, cosmic rays were first identified, and psychoanalysis was born. All around her are architectural remnants of those heady days, like the 1910 Art Nouveau observatory on the edge of the Danube Canal—reminders that a place’s status as a scientific powerhouse is only as secure as the geopolitics that surrounds it.
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Lobinska is just the kind of scientist that Heinz Fassmann, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, hoped to lure to…
