The 2025 China Youth May Fourth Medal honor was recently awarded to 30 individuals and 30 groups for making outstanding contributions, with sci-tech professionals accounting for a significant and growing share of recipients, showcasing the dynamism of China's young scientific talent.

The 2025 list also features researchers such as Du Lingjie, whose team for the first time presented experimental evidence of a graviton-like particle called chiral graviton modes.

Du comes from the School of Physics, Nanjing University, in east China's Jiangsu Province. The findings presented by Du and his team were published in the journal Nature in 2024, marking the first experimental substantiation of the concept of gravitons, posited by pioneering works in quantum gravity since the 1930s.

As this study demanded costly and specialized equipment to operate in extremely low temperatures and strong magnetic fields, the research team once found itself in a budget crisis.

A lifeline came from the Jiangsu provincial natural science foundation, which had established a special funding channel for early-career researchers. After expert reviews of his efforts, Du secured 3 million yuan (about 416,586 U.S. dollars) in project funding, resolving the team's financial difficulties.

"Early-career researchers face critical funding gaps despite the transformative potential of their research," said Sun Jian, vice director of Nanjing University's Office of Science and Technology.

In recent years, Jiangsu Province has significantly boosted its support for early-career scientists, increasing both project allocations and financial grants -- while eliminating application quotas in physics and applied mathematics and other fields.

To incentivize innovation, a special funding channel for non-consensus research has been established, supporting projects that challenge conventional scientific paradigms. Once general objectives are approved, the funding channel grants the relevant research team full autonomy in terms of experimental design and budget execution. This mechanism minimizes the burden of operational management for scientists and maximizes intellectual freedom for groundbreaking discoveries.

Source: China rolls out comprehensive measures to foster young scientific talent