The Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship Award is an extremely prestigious fellowship reserved for exceptionally talented individuals studying in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences leading to a PhD. The candidate selection process is rigorous and competitive. Each year more than 600 applicants compete for 15-20 fellowship awards. Hertz Fellows receive full tuition fellowships to more than 40 tenable schools along with a very generous stipend. Hertz Fellowships last as long as five years and are worth approximately $250,000.
More about the Hertz Foundation:
“In addition to financial support, the Foundation provides on going 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 with their peers across generational and disciplinary lines, further enhancing their opportunities to gather information,form scientific networks and make contributions.” Learn more
In 2011, Princeton University seniors Cameron Myhrvold and Kay Ousterhout won the Hertz Graduate Fellowship and received $250,000 each in no-strings-attached research funding. Myhrvold plans to pursue graduate work either in the Systems Biology Ph.D. Program at Harvard University or the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Seattle native is not yet certain in which direction he will take his doctoral study, given his fascination for questions to do with the origins of life, evolution and synthetic biology. Ousterhout, a computer science major from Palo Alto, Calif., plans to use the fellowship funding to pursue research relating to the flow of data across the Internet by focusing on distributed systems and networking, areas of computer science that center on using multiple computers working together to process information. She has been accepted to several doctoral programs and is deciding which she will attend. Read more.