Pleuni Pennings

Pleuni Pennings is an evolutionary biologist who studies how pathogens evolve resistance to drugs, and who left her tenured professorship at San Francisco State University to remain in France, taking a contract position at the University of Montpellier's Institute of Evolutionary Science.

Pennings, originally from the Netherlands, had moved to the US for scientific training and stayed for 15 years, working at Harvard, Stanford, and San Francisco State. She and her family were on what was meant to be a temporary sabbatical in Montpellier when the Trump administration's disruption of the research system convinced them to stay. She never obtained US citizenship and grew nervous about returning given reports of academics and green card holders being detained.

"A large part of what we loved about the United States is no longer there," Pennings said. In an October 2025 blog post announcing the move, she described being especially unsettled by cases like that of Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard researcher detained for months over undeclared frog embryo samples, and said an immigration lawyer had advised her that returning to the US carried real legal risk given her active social media presence on Trump- and Gaza-related issues. She also cited the loss of her department's NIH training grants, growing hostility toward her DEI-related grant strategy, and a desire to be closer to aging family members in Europe. She signed a three-year contract with the Université de Montpellier and is working on a paper about how drug resistance can be reversed, while pursuing a permanent CNRS position.