The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. It is considered to be the most competitive and prestigious graduate fellowship in science and engineering. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. The goal is for Fellows to be financially independent and free from traditional restrictions of their academic departments in order to promote innovation in collaboration with leading professors in the field. Through a rigorous application and interview process, the Hertz Foundation seeks to identify young scientists and engineers with the potential to change the world for the better and supports their research endeavors from an early stage. Fellowship recipients pledge to make their skills available to the United States in times of national emergency.
The Hertz Foundation was established in 1957 with the goal of supporting applied sciences education. The founder, John D. Hertz, was a European emigrant whose family arrived in the United States with few resources, when the Hertz was five years old. Hertz matured into a prominent entrepreneur and business leader (founder of the Yellow Cab Company and owner of the Hertz corporation) as the automotive age burgeoned in Chicago. Initially, the Foundation granted undergraduate scholarships to qualified and financially limited mechanical and electrical engineering students. In 1963, the undergraduate scholarship program was phased out and replaced with postgraduate fellowships leading to the award of the Ph.D. The scope of the studies supported by Fellowships was also enlarged to include applied sciences and engineering. Recipients of the Hertz Fellowship typically attend competitive graduate schools such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, and UC Berkeley.
For the 2015-2016 academic year, over 800 applicants applied for 12 spots, giving it an acceptance rate of 1.5%, or about a quarter of that of top undergraduate institutions.
Eligibility and application
To be eligible for a Hertz Fellowships, a student must be citizen or permanent resident of the United States of America. Eligible applicants must be students of the applied sciences or engineering and desire to pursue a Ph.D. degree in the applied sciences or engineering. College seniors as well as graduate students already pursuing a Ph.D. may apply.
The application period opens on 1 September, when electronic applications are made available by the Hertz Foundation. All Fellowship applicants are notified by mail of the Foundation's action on their application on or before 1 April.
Manjul Bhargava, Fields Medal 2014
Lars Bildsten, Director, Kavli Institute at UCSB
Eric Boe, NASA Astronaut
Ed Boyden, Breakthrough Prize 2016
Mung Chiang, Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor at Princeton University, 2013 Alan T. Waterman Award recipient
Isaac Chuang, Quantum computing pioneer
Doyne Farmer, an originator of econo-physics
Mike Farmwald, Founder of Rambus, Inc.
Alice P. Gast, President, Imperial College of London
Peter Hagelstein, Inventor, X-Ray laser
Danny Hillis, Inventor, entrepreneur, and author
Derek Lidow, Founder of iSuppli Corp.
Robert Lourie, Head of Futures research at Renaissance Technologies
John C. Mather, Nobel Laureate 2006
Mike Montemerlo, Winning Team Leader, DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
Nathan Myhrvold, Founder, Intellectual Ventures, former CTO, Microsoft
General Ellen M. Pawlikowski, Commander, Air Force Material Command
Joseph Polchinski, Fundamental Physics Prize 2017
William H. Press, Former Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Los Alamos National Lab
Ray Sidney, Google entrepreneur
Alfred Spector, CTO of Two Sigma and former VP of Research at Google
Astro Teller, Director, Google X
Michael Telson, Former CFO at the Department of Energy
Lee T. Todd, Jr., Entrepreneur, President of the University of Kentucky
Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate 2001
In 2007, three of MIT Technology Review's TR35 young innovators were Hertz Fellows, with two more in 2009 and another in 2010.
The Hertz Foundation requires that each Fellow furnish the Foundation a copy of his or her doctoral dissertation upon receiving the Ph.D. The Foundation's Thesis Prize Committee examines the Ph.D. dissertations for their overall excellence and pertinence to high-impact applications of the physical sciences. Each Thesis Prize winner receives an honorarium of $5,000. In addition, two faculty members who profoundly influenced the winner (as designated by the Thesis Prize winners) also receive honoraria of $1,000.
2015 Jeffrey Weber, Far-From-Equilibrium Phenomena in Protein Dynamics
2014 Matthew Pelliccione, Local Imaging of High Mobility Two-Dimensional Electron Systems with Virtual Scanning Tunneling Microscopy
2014 Joseph Rosenthal, Engineered Outer Membrane Vesicles Derived from Probiotic Escherichia Coli Nissle 1917 as Recobinant Subunit Antigen Carreirs for the Development of Pathogen-Mimetic Vaccines
2013 Alex Hegyi, Nanodiamond Imaging: A New Molecular Imaging Approach
2012 Dario Amodei, Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits
2012 Vincent Holmberg, Semiconductor Nanowires: From a Nanoscale System to a Macroscopic Material
2012 Daniel Slichter, Quantum Jumps and Measurement Backaction in a Superconducting Qubit
2011 Anna Bershteyn, Lipid-coated micro- and nanoparticles as a biomimetic vaccine delivery platform
2011 Kevin Esvelt, A System for the Continuous Directed Evolution of Biomolecules
2011 Monika Schleier-Smith, Cavity-Enabled Spin Squeezing for a Quantum-Enhanced Atomic Clock
2010 Erez Lieberman-Aiden, Evolution and the Emergence of Structure
2009 Paul Podsiadlo, Layer-by-Layer Assembly of Nanostructures Composites: Mechanics and Applications
2009 Mikhail Shapiro, Genetically Engineered Sensors for Non-Invasive Molecular Imaging using MRI
2008 Alexander Wissner-Gross, Physically Programmable Surfaces
2007 Lilian Childress, Coherent Manipulation of Single Quantum Systems in the Solid State
2007 Christopher Loose, The Production, Design, and Application of Antimicrobial Peptides
2007 Cindy Regal, Experimental Realization of BCS-BEC Crossover Physics with a Fermi Gas of Atoms
2006 Edward Boyden, Task-Selective Neural Mechanisms of Memory Encoding
2005 Cameron G. R. Geddes, Plasma Channel Guided Laser Wakefield Accelerator
2004 Youssef Marzouk, Vorticity Structure and Evolution in a Transverse Jet with New Algorithms for Scalable Particle Simulation
2003 David Kent IV, New Quantum Monte Carlo Algorithms to Efficiently Utilize Massively Parallel Computers
2002 Daniel Steck, Quantum Chaos, Transport, and Decoherence in Atom Optics
2001 Krishna S. Nayak, Fast Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging
2000 Joseph H. Thywissen, Internal State Manipulation for Neutral Atom Lithography
1999 Andrew J. Thiel, Detection of DNA Hybridization to Oligonucleotide Arrays on Gold Surfaces Using In Situ Surface Plasmon Resonance and Fluorescence Imaging Techniques
1998 Adam T. Woolley, Microfabricated Integrated DNA Analysis Systems
1997 Deirdre Olynick, In-Situ Studies of Copper Nano-Particles Using a Novel Tandem Ultra-High Vacuum Particle Production Chamber Transmission Electron Microscope
1997 Eli N. Glezer, Ultrafast Electronic and Structural Dynamics in Solids
1996 Andrew H. Miklich, Low-Frequency Noise in High-T2 Superconductor Josephson Junctions, SQUIDs, and Magnetometers
1996 Krishna Shenoy, Monolithic Optoelectronic VLSI Circuit Design and Fabrication for Optical Interconnects
1995 Eric Altschuler, The Movement Rehearsal Paradigm is a Mental Communication Channel
1994 Richard D. Braatz, Robust Loopshaping for Process Control
1992 Kenneth L Shepard, Electron Transport in Mesoscopic Conductors
1992 Robert C. Barrett, Development and Applications of Atomic Force Spectroscopy
1990 Scott L. Rakestraw, Monoclonal Antibody-Targeted Laser Photolysis of Tumor Tissue
1990 H. Paul Shuch, Near Midair Collisions as an Indicator of General Aviation Collision Risk
1989 W. Neil McCasland, Sensor and Actuator Selection for Fault-Tolerant Control of Flexible Structures
1988 Michael Reed, Si-SiO2 Interface Trap Anneal Kinetics
1988 Eric Swartz, Solid-Solid Thermal Boundary Resistance
1988 K. Peter Beiersdorfer, High Resolution Studies of the X-Ray Transitions in Highly Charged Neonlike Ions of the PLT Tokamak
1987 Douglas Bowman, High Speed Polycrystalline Silicon Photoconductors for On-Chip Pulsing and Gating
1987 Brian L. Heffner, Switchable Optical Fiber Taps Using the Acousto-Optic Bragg Interaction
1987 Dale Stuart, A Guidance Algorithm for Cooperative Tether-Mediated Orbital Rendezvous
1987 Aryeh M. Weiss, Real Time Control of the Permeability of Crosslinked Polyelectrolyte Membranes to Fluorescent Solutes
1986 Lawrence C. West, Spectroscopy of GaAs Quantum Wells
1986 Joel Fajans, Radiation Measurements of an Intermediate Energy Free Electron Laser
1985 W. Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine
1985 Stephen P. Boyd, Volterra Series: Engineering Fundamentals
1985 Steven R. Hall, A Failure Detection Algorithm for Linear Dynamic Systems
1984 Andrew M. Weiner, Femtosecond Optical Pulse Generation and Dephasing Measurements in Condensed Matter
1984 David Tuckerman, Heat-Transfer Microstructures for Integrated Circuits
1984 Michel A. Floyd, Single-Step Optimal Control of Large Space Structures
1983 Emanuel M. Sachs, Edge Stabilized Ribbon Growth: A New Method for the Manufacture of Photovoltaic Substrates
1982 Mike Farmwald, On the Design of High Performance Digital Arithmetic Units
1982 Lawrence C. Widdoes, Automatic Physical Design of Large Wire-Wrap Digital Systems
1981 Sherman Chan, Small Signal Control of Multiterminal DC/AC Power Systems
1981 Peter L. Hagelstein, Physics of Short Wavelength Laser Design
1981 Charles E. Leiserson, Area-Efficient VLSI Computation
1981 Thomas McWilliams, Verification of Timing Constraints on Large Digital Systems
