Hertz Foundation

Overview

The Hertz Foundation is the private nonprofit behind one of the most selective doctoral awards in American science: the Hertz Fellowship, which has funded more than 1,300 scientists and engineers since 1963 with up to five years of support worth more than $250,000 apiece (MIT News; Princeton University). Its alumni roster reads like a map of modern deep tech — two Nobel laureates, 11 Breakthrough Prize winners, recipients of the Turing Award and the Fields Medal, and more than 3,000 patents (Princeton University). The thesis-prize winners’ roll is equally striking: it includes Erez Lieberman-Aiden, Danny Hillis — and, in 2012, a neural-circuits researcher named Dario Amodei, later the CEO of Anthropic (Hertz Foundation).

The fellowship

The foundation’s own site traces the organization to 1957, when John and Fannie Hertz established it and endowed their fortune to fund future scientific leadership (Hertz Foundation). Universities, meanwhile, date the fellowship program itself to 1963 — MIT says the fellowship was established in 1963, and Princeton says the program launched that year (MIT News; Princeton University). This profile states both claims as their sources state them rather than merging them into a single founding date.

What the fellowship offers is money with unusual freedom. Each recipient gets five years of financial support — a stipend plus full tuition equivalent, valued at more than $250,000 — which MIT News describes as giving them “an unusual measure of autonomy to pursue ground-breaking research in their graduate work” (MIT News). Princeton quotes the program as offering fellows “the independence needed to pursue research that best advances our nation’s security and leads to life-changing innovations” (Princeton University). The foundation selects up to 25 new fellows each year; the 2026 cohort numbered 19 nationally, with four MIT affiliates among them, and the selection process was co-led by a Hertz Fellow who directs the Gates Foundation’s malaria program (MIT News; Hertz Foundation). The 2022 cohort was chosen from a pool of more than 650 applicants (Princeton University).

The foundation also runs an active alumni economy around its fellows: lifelong access to events, mentoring and networking; two summer internships with the Gates Foundation during doctoral research; and partnerships with organizations including Breakthrough Energy and Analog Devices (Hertz Foundation). Fellows’ work has touched advanced medical therapies, global defense networks and the James Webb Space Telescope (MIT News).

Selection and the community

Getting a fellowship means surviving one of the most competitive doctoral selection processes in the country. In 2022, 13 fellows were chosen from a national pool of more than 650 applicants (Princeton University). The foundation’s site frames the fellowship as the nation’s most prestigious PhD award in applied science, engineering and mathematics, handed through a selection process it says has been honed over decades (Hertz Foundation; Hertz Foundation).

The people doing the choosing are usually former fellows themselves. The 2026 selection process was co-led by Philip Welkhoff, a Hertz Fellow who directs the Gates Foundation’s malaria program, who said the cohort stood out for “fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science,” plus “tremendous creativity, grit, and vision” (MIT News). The foundation’s board chair, Stephen Fantone, described the newest recipients as future directors of research teams, government leaders, and heads of major corporations and startups (Princeton University). Princeton alone has had 58 Hertz fellows as graduate students, and the community counts 55 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine alongside the two Nobel laureates (Princeton University; Hertz Foundation). As of this writing the foundation is recruiting its 2027 cohort, with applications closing October 30 (Hertz Foundation).

The thesis prize and the Amodei link

Since 1981, the foundation has awarded the Hertz Thesis Prize to fellows whose doctoral dissertations the Board of Directors judges to show overall excellence and potential for high-impact applications in the physical sciences (Hertz Foundation; MIT News). Each winner receives a $5,000 honorarium, plus $1,000 each for two faculty advisers the winner names as having profoundly influenced their research (MIT News). More than 60 fellows have been recognized across the decades, with names ranging from Danny Hillis, honored in 1985 for “The Connection Machine,” to Erez Lieberman-Aiden, honored in 2010 (Hertz Foundation).

The 2012 prize went to Dario Amodei for “Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits” (Hertz Foundation) — the same researcher who would later co-found and lead Anthropic. The 2011 prize, drawn from a pool of 15 fellows, went to three recipients: MIT’s Anna Bershteyn and Monika Schleier-Smith, plus Kevin Esvelt (MIT News; Hertz Foundation). Multiple-winner years recur in the prize’s history — 2019 honored both Jenny Schloss, for nitrogen-vacancy diamond magnetic sensors, and Sam Rodriques, for mapping cell types and connections in neural circuits (Hertz Foundation). The prize’s mechanics are simple: all fellows are eligible during the calendar year their thesis is completed, and each fellow submits a copy of the dissertation to the foundation after earning the PhD (Hertz Foundation). The 2011 winners were chosen from a pool of just 15 fellows, with the committee recommending three winners because, in the foundation’s president’s words, “there was such a high level of quality in the work produced this year” (MIT News).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not merge the foundation’s 1957 origin and the fellowship’s 1963 launch into a single founding date — the foundation’s own site says “since 1957” while MIT and Princeton date the fellowship program to 1963, and the profile reports both as stated. It does not recount John Hertz’s business history; no fully-read source for this profile verified the Yellow Cab or rental-car details. It does not state Dario Amodei’s fellowship year — only his 2012 thesis prize is verified here — and it does not claim the thesis prize caused any recipient’s later career. The alumni totals (1,300-plus fellows, 3,000-plus patents, two Nobel laureates) are the figures stated by the foundation and the cited universities, not an independent audit.