Walking into a lab at night, you’ll find fluorescent lights illuminating rows of microscopes and postdoctoral students hunched over their work. They’re performing experiments and analyzing data for established, tenured researchers. Their hope is that the long hours will pay off and they’ll be able to start their own labs in the next few years.

But before they can become established university faculty and run their own labs, they must vie for dwindling funding and research positions. Unfortunately, public funding for biomedical research has remained stagnant since the early 2000s; the pool of money has been shrinking as more scientists have entered the field and drawn from it. For young researchers, applying for funding is especially daunting, as they don’t have much of their own published research to make them stand out.

To support young investigators, Children’s Cancer Research Fund is providing four Emerging Scientist Awards to highly qualified postdoctoral students around the country so they can explore their own ideas, publish research to apply for larger grants and gain expertise in their areas of interest.

Sources used: The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists and the University of Minnesota