The Hertz Foundation announced that it awarded 2026 fellowships to a few present MIT college students in addition to an incoming graduate pupil. They are: Annika Marschner, Alvin Q. Meng, Zachary S. Siegel, and Matthew Wanta.
The prestigious science and expertise award offers every recipient with 5 years of economic assist — a stipend and full tuition equal — which provides them an uncommon measure of autonomy to pursue ground-breaking analysis of their graduate work.
“What particularly impresses me about this cohort is their fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science,” says Philip Welkhoff, a Hertz Fellow and director of the malaria program on the Gates Foundation, who co-led the choice course of. “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.”
In addition to funding, fellows obtain lifelong entry to Hertz Foundation packages together with occasions, mentoring, and networking alternatives, with the over 1,300 fellows named for the reason that fellowship was established in 1963. The connections solid amongst these people have sparked collaborative startups, analysis, and commercialization in a spread of expertise, science, and engineering fields. Hertz Fellows have contributed to breakthroughs in such areas as superior medical therapies, world protection networks, and the James Webb Space Telescope.
This yr’s MIT-affiliated recipients are amongst a complete of 19 Hertz Foundation Fellows students chosen from throughout the United States.
Annika Marschner ’26 majored in mechanical engineering and can start her PhD at MIT within the fall. Her undergraduate analysis centered on the event of novel applied sciences for each biointerfacing and bio-inspired techniques, together with a customized benchtop stereoscope-compatible incubator and extrusion-based desktop bioprinter for MIT’s Raman Lab, a light-based filamented bioprinting system for ETH Zürich’s Tissue Engineering and Biofabrication Lab, and large-scale {hardware} designs for robotic techniques in MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Marschner’s undergraduate thesis targeted on enhancing the velocity and dexterity of dynamic motions in bio-inspired robotic limbs. As a graduate pupil, she plans to proceed her work on each {hardware} and management system design in biologically related settings, particularly within the areas of assistive medical expertise and surgical robotics.
Alvin Q. Meng is doctoral pupil in inorganic chemistry specializing in understanding the elemental interactions underlying chemical construction and reactivity. He is at the moment finding out iron-sulfur clusters below the steerage of Professor Daniel L.M. Suess. Born in Tianjin, China, Meng immigrated to the United States on the age of 10. He obtained undergraduate levels in chemistry and arithmetic from the University of Virginia, the place he labored within the analysis group of Professor W. Dean Harman. His analysis concerned the synthesis and characterization of dihapto-coordinated tungsten complexes of cyclopentadiene, specializing in a category of surprising binuclear species containing a carbon–carbon bond linking two metal-bound five-membered rings.
Zachary S. Siegel is {an electrical} engineering and pc science graduate pupil pursuing a PhD within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the place he works on the intersection of robotics, cognitive science, and synthetic intelligence. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BSE in pc science and a minor in philosophy, receiving honors together with Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi and the Outstanding Computer Science Independent Work Prize. His senior thesis, suggested by Tom Griffiths and Jacob Andreas, investigated how people infer the targets of others in open-ended, real-world environments. Siegel demonstrated how Bayesian inference serves as an correct mannequin of individuals’s objective predictions by evaluating partial observations to a discovered library of attainable plans weighted by their prior chance. His doctoral analysis objective is to construct machines that be taught and cause extra like individuals — techniques that may be taught from restricted knowledge and generalize to new conditions by combining robotic planning and Bayesian inference. Siegel is especially keen on combinatorial generalization: the human capability to compose identified expertise in novel methods to unravel beforehand unseen issues with out further demonstrations. At MIT, he’s suggested by Leslie P. Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
Matthew Wanta is an incoming doctoral pupil who will start operations analysis at MIT within the fall. He is a category of 2026 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point with a bachelor’s diploma in pc science and mathematical sciences, each with honors. His work centered on machine studying for autonomous techniques, integrating probabilistic modeling and pc imaginative and prescient into cooperative drone search and swarm management frameworks. In collaboration with DEVCOM Armaments Center, Wanta developed pc imaginative and prescient fashions for detecting energetic defects in artillery munitions, enabling speedy, nonintrusive high quality management in protection manufacturing. His work with U.S. Special Operations Command and Army C5ISR organizations targeted on autonomous aerial search and sensing, the place he constructed simulation architectures for probabilistic goal localization and multi-agent coordination. Wanta served as firm commander for Bravo Company, 2nd Regiment; president of Upsilon Pi Epsilon; and vp of Phi Kappa Phi. He is an Astronaut Scholar and Sapper School graduate, and commissioned as an Army officer within the Cyber Corps.