In addition to financial support, the Hertz Foundation provides ongoing mentoring, symposia, and a network of peers providing Fellows with a forum to share ideas and explore opportunities throughout their careers. The Foundation is developing ways for Hertz Fellows to communicate across generational and disciplinary lines, further enhancing their opportunities to gather information, form scientific networks, and make contributions.

Hertz Fellows are quite unique not only in the depth but mostly in the breadth of their scientific knowledge and interests, and this is most probably due to the Hertz selection process. I have yet to encounter another setting (much less an informal one), where twenty or so people can all be involved in the detailed conversations involving anything from stem cell research to how much farmland would be required for the US to be a biofuel-based economy.  -Radi Mihaescu, third year Fellow, UC Berkeley