Newswise — Stanford, Harvard, Indiana University and the world-famous Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. These are just some of the American institutions from which top faculty have migrated to Canada. After years of talking about the "brain drain" to the US, Canadian universities are now experiencing a "brain gain" as academics follow student migration patterns to Canada.
All across the country, from Dalhousie University on the East Coast, to McGill University in Central Canada, to the University of British Columbia on the West Coast, academics working in the United States are increasingly drawn to the opportunities afforded them at Canadian institutions.
A recent CanWest News Service article highlighted the flip side of the so-called brain drain, namely that "while large numbers of Canadians are moving to the United States, the Americans who move northward tend to be better-educated and more successful than immigrants from any other country." Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Canadian post-secondary community.
So why are so many academics making the move north? Some, like Brian Alters of McGill are looking for an experience working in a different culture while maintaining a relatively close distance to the US. Others, like Joe Zwanziger of Dalhousie, prefer the more stable funding formula at Canadian universities to that of their American counterparts. Whatever the diverse reasons, more and more academics are making the move.
Examples of the "brain gain" include Daniel Levitin of McGill. Levitin worked at Stanford and Berkeley as a Psychology professor before making the trek north. Levitin, who boasts an almost impossibly diverse CV including a background as a professional musician, recording engineer, record producer, music writer, stand-up comedian, and a provider of punch lines for the "Bizarro" comic strip, is glad to be in Canada.
"I'm thrilled," he says. "On the whole, my career is going much better here than it was in the States. That's in large part due to the more democratic granting system. In the U.S., the way it works in my field anyway " the major agencies I would apply to are NIH or NSF. They're really working on a star system where every grant cycle, a few people get a whole ton of money. Here, it seems to be the case that everyone gets a little." He says he's pleased with the progress he has made in his field of study whereby he tries to look at the brain processes underlying hearing and listening. "The lab has been building up. I'm able to attract good people and so far, I've been able to pay them. I have 15 people in the lab. In the US, I was basically working on my own " with an occasional undergraduate."
Dalhousie's Andrew Roger spent three years with the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts before heading north. He decided to come to Dal, where he had done graduate work, despite offers from other universities including UCLA. Why Dalhousie? "In the field of comparative genomics and evolutionary genomics, the group here run by Ford Doolittle and Mike Gray " their focus and expertise is second-to-none in the world," he says. "It was a matter of deciding what environment I wanted to do my research in. Coming to a place where it's one of the major places in the world that does this kind of research was the real reason I decided to come back to Dal." Like Levitin, he also points out funding is a major draw to the Canadian system. "I've often pointed out that for the amount of dollars that actually goes into research, you get an incredible return on it in Canada compared to the U.S. Here, there are fewer dollars going into research but the productivity per research dollar is much higher than in the U.S. That's not an argument to keep us under funded but it's an argument to say that there's a lot of competitive spirit in science here. It's very clear in certain areas that we are the world leaders. In my field, for instance, it's clear that Canada is better, in some respects, than the U.S. to do this kind of research. Obviously overall, they're going to win. But in certain key areas, we do as well, if not better, than they do."
For the Harvard and UCLA-educated Edith Chen, the University of British Columbia and Canada provided new opportunities appealing enough to lure her from Washington University in St. Louis. She's now the co-director of the Psychobiology of Health Lab at UBC. "I think for myself and my husband (also an academic), that the UBC offer was more competitive than options in the States. It's more a reflection of the positives of the current Canadian granting system than it is a reflection of difficulties in the States," she says. "The professional opportunities are really terrific in Canada. A lot of people in the United States aren't aware of... the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Michael Smith Foundation and all the different sources where you can find research support." The draw of her chosen city was also appealing. She adds: "Of course, Vancouver is a wonderful place to live."
Others like Joe Zwanziger, who was a post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley and taught at Indiana University before leaving for a position as the Canada Research Chair in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Studies of Materials at Dalhousie, or Brian Alters, who came from Harvard to teach Education at McGill have very specific reasons for making the switch.
Zwanziger was drawn to Dalhousie and the opportunities to further his research and like others, cites funding issues as a reason to choose Canada over the US. "One of the really attractive things about this position is the way that the Canadian funding position works," he says. "So by combining the funding from the Canada Research Chair with NSERC funding and the way that there's not a large amount of funding taken off for indirect costs and given how stable the funding is here " the operating funding here is very stable, from an American's perspective and gives you a lot more freedom than the funding in the American system does."
Meanwhile, Alters likes the cultural opportunities and quality of life available in a city like Montreal. "Many things are different," he points out. "We find it amazing that you can walk at night in most big cities in Canada " and particularly in Montreal " and the streets don't have to be swarming with police, like I'm used to in other large cities. I'll never forget" when my wife and I were considering moving here, we came up for a few weekends. It was 11 o'clock one night and it was summer and we decided to drive up to Mont-Royal. We had heard on a bus tour earlier that day that the park there had been designed by the same architect who did Central Park in New York City. So we drive up there, we dutifully lock all our doors, seal all our windows " with foot ready on the accelerator, ready to take off if there's a moment's danger. Going through a park late at night is not something you would want to do in most major cities in the United States at that time of night. But at Mont-Royal, there were elderly men and women as well as children out. We looked at each other, feeling somewhat foolish. So we unlocked our doors and exited our protection. We walked all around the park. Everyone was pleasant. It was wonderful. We got back into the car a half-hour later and we realized something: we hadn't seen a single uniformed police officer that whole time. We thought " this is amazing! Take that same walk through Central Park or some parks in Los Angeles late at night...you have a good chance of becoming a statistic."
Whether it's for the improved funding opportunities, the unique Canadian culture, the quality of life or simply the draw of top notch academic institutions like UBC, McGill or Dalhousie, the movement of American-based academics to Canada has indeed created a very real "brain gain" for Canada. The trend continues from one end of the country to the other and is strengthening an already robust university system even further. These arrivals to Canada have brought a unique dimension to the country's academic corridors and have received something important in return. As Brian Alters says, "It adds another dimension of richness to discussions of all kinds " cultural, political, government, schooling, upbringing discussions " to say, 'I was born in the United States but I've lived in Canada for a number of years.' "
RSS