Support Early to Mid-Career Researchers

Illuminate Awards are a philanthropic initiative - shining a light on child health research to help all kids lead happy, healthy lives.

The Illuminate Awards invites prospective donors to power the future of child health research. By supporting this initiative, donors play a pivotal role in equipping brilliant researchers with the resources and funding they need to transform their visions into ground-breaking advancements for children's health.

At Telethon Kids our greatest asset is our people. We are strongly invested in the future of child medical research welcoming, nurturing, and encouraging the best and most innovative Australian and international researchers. However, our best and brightest researchers face an increasingly competitive environment in securing research funding. This means substantial delays in research and even career insecurity, particularly for early and mid-career researchers.

With support from our community by funding an Illuminate Award, we can ensure our future changemakers are empowered to turn research into reality. Philanthropic support of next generation researchers is needed now more than ever to ensure we retain and support WA’s best and brightest minds.

The funding of an Illuminate Award can be the make or break for many of our early to mid-career researchers, allowing them to explore, discover, innovate, and even launch into international opportunities.

Illuminate Awards connect researchers and supporters together – making connections between people who have a shared vision of happy, healthy kids.

Talented early to mid-career child health researchers are supported via generous gifts through Illuminate with awards starting from $25,000 per annum.

Thanks to the support of our donors, we are able to illuminate a bright path for researchers and their bold ideas.

Dr Rachael Zemek is a 2023 People’s Choice Illuminate Award winner, after taking to the stage at the Illuminate PitchFest event, held in February.

Since the event, her Illuminate Award has launched her career to new heights, with an opportunity to work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fred Hutch Cancer Centre in Seattle.

Her work in immunotherapy treatments for Sarcoma has made breakthrough discoveries to advance our understanding about why some cancers do not respond well to immunotherapy and has identified effect new drug combinations to improve responsiveness.

Rachael will continue her work with our Telethon Kids Cancer Centre within an Honorary position to further collaborate with the team and continue the research program.

Supporting early to mid-career researchers at Telethon Kids Institute not only means new opportunities for young careers but it also expands our ability to collaborate with international partners on a global stage.

By funding an up-and-coming researcher, you will help to attract and retain the most promising researchers from Australia and overseas.

With your help, our young researchers are supported as they continue to find new ways to innovate clinical care, discover new treatments and prevent childhood diseases.

Ensuring researchers can focus on nothing but research means future generations will benefit from the latest medical knowledge and world-class treatments as our researchers continue to discover, prevent and cure.

We greatly value your support.