The Hertz Foundation, the nation’s preeminent nonprofit organization committed to advancing American scientific and technological leadership, has announced 19 recipients of the 2026 Hertz Fellowship in the applied sciences, engineering and mathematics.
Awarded through a rigorous selection process honed over eight decades, the Hertz Fellowship is the nation’s most competitive doctoral fellowship in science and technology. Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of financial support — a stipend and full tuition equivalent — offering the rare freedom to pursue bold ideas and a community of influential peers dedicated to their success.
The 2026 Hertz Fellows are pursuing solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in science and technology, including developing RNA-based tools to combat multidrug-resistant bacteria, building a satellite mission to locate the universe’s missing matter, creating AI systems that learn and reason like humans, and advancing quantum simulation to probe questions once thought purely theoretical. Like every Hertz Fellow since 1963, the newest recipients make a moral commitment to support the United States in times of national emergency.
“Year after year, the Hertz Fellowship identifies individuals whose ambitions go far beyond personal achievement. This class is no exception,” said Stephen Fantone, chair of the Hertz Foundation board of directors and president and CEO of Optikos Corporation. “Our newest Hertz Fellows are committed to solving problems that matter for our national security, our health and our future.”
The new fellows represent a wide range of disciplines — astrophysics, quantum chemistry, robotics, plant science, neuroscience and more — and will conduct their doctoral research at some of the nation’s most distinguished research universities. The class also includes the latest Hertz Fellow to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point, continuing an enduring tradition of Hertz Fellows with distinguished military careers.
“Year after year, the Hertz Fellowship identifies individuals whose ambitions go far beyond personal achievement. This class is no exception.”
In addition to financial support, the 19 new fellows join an interdisciplinary community of more than 1,300 Hertz Fellows worldwide, collectively responsible for some of the most significant scientific and technological progress of the past century. From the James Webb Space Telescope to global defense networks, and from advanced medical therapies to computational systems used by billions, Hertz Fellows turn groundbreaking research into real-world impact.
Fellows also gain access to lifelong programming, including mentoring, events and networking, that has supported research collaborations, technology commercialization, and the creation of early-stage companies. They benefit from partnerships with influential organizations in science, technology, national security and philanthropy, including the Gates Foundation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Analog Devices and the American Physical Society.
“The strength of the Hertz Fellowship has always been its commitment to the long view — supporting fellows not just through graduate school but throughout their lives,” said Wendy Connors, president of the Hertz Foundation. “The 2026 class joins a community that spans generations and disciplines, and we are committed to their success.”
Through a rigorous and time-tested selection process, led by Hertz Fellows Philip Welkhoff, director of the malaria program at the Gates Foundation, and Anna Bershteyn, associate professor of population health at New York University, the Hertz Fellowship identifies doctoral students with the extraordinary creativity and principled leadership necessary to tackle problems others can’t solve.
“The 2026 class of Hertz Fellows joins a community that spans generations and disciplines, and we are committed to their success.”
Wendy Connors
“What particularly impresses me about this cohort is their fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science. Each has exhibited tremendous creativity, grit and vision, and I cannot wait to see what each accomplishes with the freedom to innovate provided by the Hertz Fellowship,” said Welkhoff. “Each of them will contribute to and benefit from the interdisciplinary Hertz community, and the impact of their work will benefit the United States in profound and lasting ways.”
“It’s an honor to welcome these brilliant minds into the Hertz community. Each of them has a unique way of being curious about the world, and took a unique path to this moment,” said Bershteyn. “Now, they’ll have the opportunity to uplift one another and join forces at the interfaces between their fields. That’s what makes the Hertz community such a powerful engine of innovation.”
Among past Hertz Fellow recipients are Nobel laureate John Mather, a NASA astrophysicist and former project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope; Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Kathleen Fisher, chief executive officer of Aria; and Dario Amodei and Jared Kaplan, co-founders of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company.
Throughout the foundation’s 63-year history of awarding fellowships, more than 1,300 Hertz Fellows have established a remarkable track record. Their ranks include two Nobel laureates; recipients of 11 Breakthrough Prizes and three MacArthur Foundation awards; and winners of the Turing Award, the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Technology, the National Medal of Science and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award. In addition, 53 are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and 37 are fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hertz Fellows hold more than 3,000 patents, have founded more than 375 companies and have created hundreds of thousands of science and technology jobs.
Meet the 2026 Hertz Fellows
HANNAH BARSOUK
Undergraduate: Yale University
Graduate: Stanford University
Field of Study: Biochemistry
Hannah Barsouk is a first-year doctoral student in biochemistry and a chemical-biology interface trainee at Stanford University, where they aim to develop RNA-based technologies to enable programmable control of biological systems and define how regulatory networks become disrupted in disease. In 2025, Barsouk graduated from Yale University with joint bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biophysics and biochemistry.
ANDREW CHU
Field of Study: Materials Science and Engineering
Undergraduate: Harvard University
Graduate: Stanford University
Andrew Chu is a senior at Harvard University studying chemistry and physics, with research interests at the intersection of materials science and electrochemistry for energy technology. As an undergraduate, Chu worked with MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang on sustainable electrochemical metals production and separations. At electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, he led efforts on battery supply chain decarbonization and circularity. He will begin doctoral studies at Stanford University in fall 2027.
ELIZABETH CHUNG
Undergraduate: The Ohio State University
Graduate: University of California, San Francisco
Field of Study: Systems Biology and Neuroimmunology
Elizabeth Chung is an MD-PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco, where she harnesses medical insights and systems biology to develop novel therapeutics for neuroimmune diseases. Driven by her late father’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, Chung’s research integrates large-scale epidemiological data with mechanistic insights into how the immune system interacts with the nervous system. Chung earned a bachelor’s degree in biology magna cum laude from The Ohio State University, where she began full-time collegiate studies at age 14 and graduated from both university and high school simultaneously.
CHARLES COLVIN
Undergraduate: The Pennsylvania State University
Graduate: Duke University
Field of Study: Plant Sciences
Charles Colvin is completing his undergraduate education in plant sciences at The Pennsylvania State University and will begin his doctoral studies at Duke University in fall 2026. Colvin investigates how plant genetics shape ecological interactions, with the goal of leading public research that leverages genomics and molecular breeding to develop resilient crop systems requiring fewer chemical inputs. Among his notable accomplishments is uncovering how maize flavonoids restructure insect gut microbial communities, revealing a previously underexplored mechanistic link between host plant metabolism and insect-microbe dynamics.
ADAM DISTLER
Undergraduate: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Graduate: Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Field of Study: Astronomy, Astrophysics
Adam Distler is a first-year doctoral student in astronomy and astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where he studies the link between the galactic environment and planetary structure. Distler is broadly interested in how changes in the galactic environment affect the habitability of exoplanets in the search for life across the galaxy. His earlier work focused on exoplanet detection and characterization, and he also has investigated gravitational dynamics ranging from small planets to massive black holes. Distler earned his bachelor’s degree in two years from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in astronomy-physics and mathematics.
SAM FOXMAN
Undergraduate: California Institute of Technology
Graduate: Stanford University
Field of Study: Aeronautics and Astronautics
Sam Foxman is a senior in computer science at the California Institute of Technology, where he has worked across four NASA missions on spacecraft communication, mission operations, fluid dynamics and artificial intelligence. In fall 2026, Foxman will begin graduate studies in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. His future research interests include spacecraft communication and navigation architectures, AI in space, autonomous vehicles and learning more about the universe.
TYLER HOU
Undergraduate: University of California, Berkeley
Graduate: Princeton University
Field of Study: Computer Science, Mathematics
Tyler Hou is an undergraduate in mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research applies algebra and logic to develop more sophisticated reasoning systems for programming languages and distributed systems. At Berkeley, Hou has worked toward developing frameworks and tools to help computer scientists better specify, reason about and optimize distributed systems. During a summer research fellowship, he developed a mathematical formalism to specify and reason about distributed stream programs using monoids and monoid homomorphisms. He will begin doctoral studies at Princeton University in fall 2026.
ELIZABETH KOZLOV
Undergraduate: Harvard University
Graduate: Princeton University
Field of Study: Astrophysics, Physics
Elizabeth Kozlov is a doctoral student in astrophysics at Princeton University, where she studies the geometry of spacetime at its most extreme limits. Her current work investigates how photon ring observables, the narrow, self-similar features formed by photons that orbit the black hole one or more times before reaching the observer, encode the geometry of their underlying emission surfaces in Kerr spacetime, characterizing the degeneracy structure of these observables under variations in inclination, emission physics, and magnetic field configuration, and identifying observable combinations that permit robust spin inference. Kozlov graduated from Harvard cum laude with high honors in physics, receiving the Carol Davis Prize, the Herchel Smith Fellowship and a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for her work in quantum mechanics.
DANIEL LESMAN
Undergraduate: The Ohio State University
Graduate: Harvard University
Field of Study: Synthetic Biology
Dan Lesman is an MD-PhD student at Harvard University, where his research centers on developing computational and experimental techniques to study proteins that circulate in the blood. Before starting his MD-PhD, Lesman spent two years at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earning master’s degrees in global health and statistics. Lesman earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical science from The Ohio State University, where he worked on therapeutics for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
MILLER MACDONALD
Undergraduate: Harvard College
Graduate: Harvard University
Field of Study: Physics and Astronomy
Miller MacDonald is a senior undergraduate studying physics and mathematics at Harvard College, where he works to understand the high-energy astrophysical sources of fundamental particles called neutrinos. He currently works within the IceCube Collaboration, using data collected by the largest telescope on Earth to search for neutrino emission from sources in the Milky Way. As a Fulbright Fellow, he will spend the 2026-27 academic year as a guest researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen before beginning his doctoral studies at Harvard University.
ANNIKA MARSCHNER
Undergraduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Graduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field of Study: Mechanical Engineering
Annika Marschner is a fourth-year undergraduate in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a research focus on the design of electromechanical systems for biointerfacing settings. When she begins doctoral studies at MIT in fall 2026, Marschner plans to continue her work on both hardware and control system design in biologically relevant settings, especially in the areas of assistive medical technology and surgical robotics.
ALVIN Q. MENG
Undergraduate: University of Virginia
Graduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field of Study: Chemistry
Alvin Q. Meng is an inorganic chemist and doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works to understand the fundamental interactions underlying chemical structure and reactivity. He is currently studying iron–sulfur clusters under the guidance of Professor Daniel L.M. Suess. He received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Virginia, where he worked under Professor W. Dean Harman researching the synthesis and characterization of dihapto-coordinated tungsten complexes of cyclopentadiene.
JACKSON POWELL
Undergraduate: University of Pennsylvania
Graduate: Stanford University
Field of Study: Bioengineering
Jackson Powell is a second-year medical student in Stanford University’s MD-PhD program, where he studies the brain through cross human-mouse research in the Deisseroth Lab and Human Neural Circuitry program. Powell’s research aims to better understand fundamental principles about the brain and drive future treatments. He plans to become a neurosurgeon and hopes his work can bridge basic neuroscience and clinical care. Powell earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in the Vagelos Molecular Life Sciences program.
NIKHIL SESHADRI
Undergraduate: Harvard University
Graduate: California Institute of Technology
Field of Study: Chemistry
Nikhil Seshadri is a post-bachelor’s student at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) working on fundamental problems in theoretical chemistry, chemical physics and the physics and chemistry of materials. At LANL, Seshadri works with Dr. Yu Zhang on cavity quantum electrodynamics, specifically extending the Gutzwiller wavefunction method to account for nonlocal electron-electron and electron-photon interactions. This work aims to provide a unified framework for studying the interplay between these interactions, and how they can be tuned to discover new quantum phases and control material properties. He will pursue doctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology in fall 2026.
ZACHARY S. SIEGEL
Undergraduate: Princeton University
Graduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field of Study: Artificial Intelligence
Zachary S. Siegel is a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works at the intersection of robotics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Siegel’s research goal is to build machines that learn and reason more like people — systems that can learn from limited data and generalize to new situations by combining robot planning and Bayesian inference. Siegel graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in computer science and a minor in philosophy.
MATTHEW WANTA
Undergraduate: United States Military Academy at West Point
Graduate: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field of Study: Operations Research
Matthew Wanta will graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point class of 2026 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematical sciences, both with honors, with a research focus on autonomous systems and machine learning for defense and national security applications. At West Point, Wanta serves as company commander for Bravo Company, 2nd Regiment, president of Upsilon Pi Epsilon and vice president of Phi Kappa Phi. He is an Astronaut Scholar and Sapper school graduate. He will commission as an Army officer in the Cyber Corps and intends to pursue a doctorate in Operations Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in fall 2026.
MATTHEW WERNEKEN
Undergraduate: Columbia University
Graduate: Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Field of Study: Astronomy, Astrophysics
Matthew Werneken is an astronomy doctoral student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where he works on astrophysical instrumentation and observational surveys to study the environments of the Milky Way galaxy and its neighbors. Werneken aims to use this dual focus in designing the next generation of observatories on ground and in space, to solve the mysteries behind how galaxies form and evolve. He is currently working on a major new survey to map the cold gas in the halo of our galaxy and set constraints on the distribution, mass, and temperature phases of this “circumgalactic medium”. He is also supporting the design and build of an accompanying high-throughput spectrograph, which will be a cornerstone tool in measuring astrophysical transients after it is commissioned in 2027. Werneken graduated from Columbia University with dual degrees in mechanical engineering and astrophysics in 2025.
ZAIN ZAIDI
Undergraduate: Stony Brook University
Graduate: Princeton University
Field of Study: Theoretical and Computational Chemistry
Zain Zaidi is a doctoral student in theoretical and computational chemistry at Princeton University, where he seeks to uncover the mechanisms governing energy transfer within and between molecules, materials and solutions. Under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Subotnik, Zaidi’s work aims to enable next-generation materials and technologies for sustainable energy applications. Zaidi received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Stony Brook University in three years.
ERIC ZHU
Undergraduate: University of California, Santa Barbara
Graduate: Harvard University
Field of Study: Quantum Physics
Eric Zhu is an undergraduate student in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with research interests at the intersection of theoretical physics and cutting-edge experimental platforms in atomic, molecular and optical physics. Zhu will pursue doctoral studies at Harvard University in fall 2026. He hopes to use quantum simulators — devices with rapidly growing capabilities for coherent control over quantum degrees of freedom — to experimentally probe questions that were once thought to be purely theoretical.
About the Hertz Foundation
The Hertz Foundation is the nation’s preeminent nonprofit organization committed to advancing American scientific and technological leadership. For more than 60 years, it has stood as an unwavering pillar of independent support through the renowned Hertz Fellowship, cultivating a multidisciplinary network of innovators whose work has positively impacted millions of lives. Learn more at hertzfoundation.org.
