HUN-REN Welcome Home Programme — Reversing Hungary's Scientific Brain Drain

Launched by HUN-REN (the Hungarian Research Network, formerly ELKH) in March 2023, the Welcome Home and Foreign Researcher Recruitment Programme is a competitive grant scheme aimed squarely at reversing Hungarian scientific brain drain. It funds Hungarian researchers currently working abroad — or foreign researchers — to relocate to a HUN-REN research site in Hungary and lead an independent research group, with non-repayable grants of up to HUF 200 million (roughly €500,000) over a maximum of five years, backed by a HUF 150 million annual implementation budget in the programme's first year.

Eligibility is tightly defined: applicants must be employed abroad, or have left a foreign position within the previous six months, and must demonstrate scientific excellence in their field; research sites are capped at one or two applications each, forcing internal prioritisation. Grantees also carry a distinctive accountability requirement — they must secure matching external funding, such as an ERC grant, an EU Framework Programme award, or an equivalent industry partnership, during the project period, tying the relocation grant to a concrete excellence benchmark rather than treating relocation itself as success.

The first funded cohort, announced in December 2023, recruited seven senior researchers — six Hungarian nationals returning from abroad and one foreign national — from Stanford University (two researchers), NYU School of Medicine/Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, the University of Eastern Finland, Eindhoven University of Technology and the Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée in France. It is a small, elite programme by design rather than a mass-scale one: public sources document only the first-round total of seven researchers, with no running multi-year count or post-grant retention data yet available.

Read the full analysis: https://hun-ren.hu/en/news/seven-internationally-renowned-researchers-are-coming-to-hungary-through-the-hun-ren