The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an Americannon-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D.students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. 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[1] with the goal of supporting applied sciences education. The founder, John D. Hertz, was a European emigrant[3] 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 the fellowships was also enlarged to include applied sciences and other engineering disciplines.
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, math or engineering, and desire to pursue a Ph.D. degree in the applied sciences, math or engineering. College seniors as well as graduate students already pursuing a Ph.D. may apply.
The application period opens in August, 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 April 1.
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.[15]
2022 Hannah Larson, Brill--Noether theory over the Hurwitz space
2021 Kurtis Carsch, Ligand Field Inversion in Sterically Confined Copper Architectures
2020 Ravi Sheth, New Tools for Understanding and Engineering Complex Microbial Communities
2019 Jenny Schloss, Optimizing Nitrogen-Vacancy Diamond Magnetic Sensors and Imagers for Broadband Sensitivity
2019 Sam Rodriques, Mapping Cell Types, Dynamics, and Connections in Neural Circuits
2018 Eric Larson, The Maximal Rank Conjecture
2017 Kyle Loh, A Developmental Roadmap for the Diversification of Human Tissue fates from Pluripotent Cells
2016 Paul Tillberg, Expansion Microscopy: Improving Imaging Through Uniform Tissue Expansion
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 Recombinant Subunit Antigen Carriers 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
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