The Hertz Foundation has selected four MIT-affiliated scholars for its 2026 fellowship cohort, awarding the prestigious science and technology grant to three current MIT students and one incoming graduate student. The recipients — Annika Marschner, Alvin Q. Meng, Zachary S. Siegel, and Matthew Wanta — each receive five years of financial support, including a stipend and full tuition equivalent, granting them unusual autonomy to pursue high-risk, high-reward research during their graduate studies.
Now in its 63rd year, the Hertz Foundation Fellowship has supported more than 1,300 fellows since its founding in 1963, creating a network that has contributed to breakthroughs in advanced medical therapies, global defense networks, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Beyond funding, fellows gain lifelong access to mentoring, events, and networking opportunities that have repeatedly sparked collaborative startups, research ventures, and commercial innovations across technology, science, and engineering fields.
Philip Welkhoff, a Hertz Fellow and director of the malaria program at the Gates Foundation who co-led the selection process, described this year’s cohort as marked by intellectual fearlessness. “What particularly impresses me about this cohort is their fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science,” Welkhoff said. “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.”
What Is the Hertz Foundation Fellowship?
The Hertz Foundation Fellowship is a multi-year award that provides recipients with full tuition and a stipend for up to five years of graduate study in the applied sciences, engineering, and mathematics. The program is designed to give fellows the freedom to pursue unconventional or high-risk research directions that might not attract traditional funding. Since 1963, the foundation has built a network of over 1,300 fellows whose work has shaped fields from biomedical engineering to space exploration.
The 2026 MIT-Affiliated Hertz Fellows
Annika Marschner
Marschner, a member of the MIT Class of 2026 who majored in mechanical engineering, will begin her PhD at MIT this fall. Her undergraduate research focused on biointerfacing and bio-inspired systems, including the development of a custom benchtop stereoscope-compatible incubator and an extrusion-based desktop bioprinter for MIT’s Raman Lab. She also contributed a light-based filamented bioprinting system for ETH Zürich’s Tissue Engineering and Biofabrication Lab and designed large-scale hardware for robotic systems in MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Her undergraduate thesis addressed improving the speed and dexterity of dynamic motions in bio-inspired robotic limbs. As a graduate student, she plans to continue advancing hardware and control system design for biologically relevant applications, particularly assistive medical technology and surgical robotics.
Alvin Q. Meng
Meng is a doctoral student in inorganic chemistry studying iron-sulfur clusters under the guidance of Professor Daniel L.M. Suess. Born in Tianjin, China, he immigrated to the United States at age 10 and later earned undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Virginia, where he worked with Professor W. Dean Harman. His research there involved synthesizing and characterizing dihapto-coordinated tungsten complexes of cyclopentadiene, focusing on unusual binuclear species connected by a carbon–carbon bond linking two metal-bound five-membered rings. His current work aims to understand the fundamental interactions that govern chemical structure and reactivity.
Zachary S. Siegel
Siegel is a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science pursuing a PhD in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where his research sits at the intersection of robotics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BSE in computer science and a minor in philosophy, and was recognized with Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and the Outstanding Computer Science Independent Work Prize. His senior thesis, advised by Tom Griffiths and Jacob Andreas, explored how humans infer the goals of others in open-ended, real-world environments, demonstrating that Bayesian inference accurately models people’s goal predictions by comparing partial observations to a learned library of possible plans weighted by prior likelihood. His doctoral goal is to build machines that learn and reason more like humans — systems capable of learning from limited data and generalizing to novel situations by combining robot planning with Bayesian inference. He is particularly interested in combinatorial generalization: the human ability to compose known skills in new ways to solve previously unseen problems without additional demonstrations. At MIT, he is advised by Leslie P. Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
Matthew Wanta
Wanta is an incoming doctoral student who will begin operations research at MIT this fall. A 2026 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he earned dual bachelor’s degrees with honors in computer science and mathematical sciences. His work focused on machine learning for autonomous systems, integrating probabilistic modeling and computer vision into cooperative drone search and swarm control frameworks. In collaboration with DEVCOM Armaments Center, he developed computer vision models for detecting energetic defects in artillery munitions, enabling rapid, nonintrusive quality control in defense manufacturing. He also worked with U.S. Special Operations Command and Army C5ISR organizations on autonomous aerial search and sensing, building simulation architectures for probabilistic target localization and multi-agent coordination. Wanta served 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, a Sapper School graduate, and commissioned as an Army officer in the Cyber Corps.
Who Benefits From the Hertz Fellowship Model
The 19 scholars selected nationwide for 2026 represent a deliberate emphasis on early-career autonomy. By removing financial constraints for five years, the fellowship enables recipients to pursue research paths that may not yet have proven commercial or publication viability — the kind of exploratory work that often leads to paradigm shifts. For professionals in AI, robotics, and engineering, the career trajectories of previous Hertz Fellows offer a strong signal: the program has consistently produced founders, senior researchers, and technical leaders who operate at the frontiers of their disciplines.
What Developers and Researchers Can Do Now
For graduate students and early-career researchers working in applied sciences, the Hertz Foundation Fellowship opens applications annually. Prospective applicants should prepare research proposals that clearly articulate both technical depth and the potential for transformative impact. Those interested can review the foundation’s application criteria and past fellow profiles at hertzfoundation.org. For readers already in graduate programs, the research directions pursued by this year’s MIT cohort — from bio-inspired robotics and iron-sulfur cluster chemistry to Bayesian machine learning and autonomous drone coordination — illustrate the range of work the fellowship supports and the level of scientific ambition it rewards.
