Executive Summary

Opportunities to study, work, and conduct research in the United States shape the careers of many of the world’s top scientists and innovators. To better understand how these global talent pathways contribute to U.S. leadership in STEM and emerging technologies, we analyze 550 recipients of four globally prestigious STEM awards between the years 2014 and 2024: the Nobel Prize (in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine), the Lasker Award, the ACM A.M. Turing Award, and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35. Of these 550 awardees, 471 (86%) lived, worked, or studied in the United States at some point in their careers, and nearly half (47%) of these U.S. awardees were foreign-born. Using publicly available information, we reconstruct how foreign-born awardees first arrived in the United States. Among the 184 foreign-born U.S. awardees whose earliest recorded U.S. educational or professional activity we could identify, two-thirds came to the United States as students (most commonly doctoral students), and nearly all of the remaining third came as postdoctoral researchers or visiting scholars, illustrating the importance of American universities as a critical pathway for U.S. STEM talent.

The pathways that brought this foreign-born STEM talent to the United States are directly exposed to policy developments: about 11% of foreign-born U.S. awardees originated from countries subject to U.S. visa suspensions or entry restrictions at some point during 2026, and that share would rise to roughly a third if restrictions under consideration for countries designated as “foreign adversaries” were carried out. Furthermore, proposals under consideration to restrict or eliminate optional practical training (OPT)—a key bridge for international students pursuing long-term employment in the United States—could weaken the pathway through which most foreign-born U.S. awardees arrived. Together, these findings suggest that U.S. scientific leadership depends not only on attracting established talent, but particularly on maintaining the early-career education and research pathways that bring globally mobile scientists to the country.