Kenneth Long

Kenneth Long is an American particle physicist who left a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in February 2026, splitting his time between Lyon and CERN near Geneva, where he studies the W boson.

Long was recruited through Choose CNRS, a programme launched shortly after the Trump administration began cutting US scientific programmes, designed to attract foreign researchers with stable positions, generous funding, and academic freedom. The funding allowed him to transition from a precarious postdoctoral position to an independent principal investigator, hiring his own student and postdoc for the first time.

Long did his undergraduate work at Tennessee Tech University before attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drawn by its partnership with CERN. "You have relatively more permanent researchers with a lot of research freedom" in France, he said, noting he no longer has to formulate his research questions around what a grant might fund. "I think it's nice to not have to chase your research topics based on what's hot."