The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation has announced that first-year Princeton graduate student Albert Qin and incoming graduate student April Qiu Cheng are two of this year’s 19 recipients of the 2025 Hertz Fellowships in applied science, mathematics and engineering.

The highly competitive Hertz Fellowship provides five years of funding, offering fellows “the independence needed to pursue research that best advances our nation’s security and leads to life-changing innovations,” according to the fellowship announcement. Each Hertz fellow receives a stipend and full tuition support valued at more than $250,000.

“Hertz fellows embody the promise of future scientific breakthroughs, major engineering achievements and thought leadership that is vital to our future,” Stephen Fantone, chair of the Hertz Foundation board of directors, said in the announcement. “The newest recipients will direct research teams, serve in leadership positions in our government, and take the helm of major corporations and startups that impact our communities and the world.”

Launched in 1963, the Hertz Fellowship has supported more than 1,300 scientists and engineers who collectively hold more than 3,000 patents and count among their ranks two Nobel Prize laureates, 11 Breakthrough Prize winners, and recipients of the National Medal of Technology, the Fields Medal and the Turing Award. Princeton has had 58 Hertz fellows as graduate students.

April Qiu Cheng

Cheng intends to use gravity waves to study the universe. “Through my life, I have found myself inexplicably drawn upward, to exotic astrophysical phenomena that betray our most fundamental questions,” Cheng wrote in the Hertz fellowship application. “What are black holes? Where did they come from? And what does that tell us about the universe itself?”

The nascent field of gravitational wave cosmology depends on the exquisitely sensitive instruments in the LIGO consortium. Cheng looks forward to working with LIGO data in a research approach that balances data analysis, theory and modeling, they wrote in their application materials.

A 2023 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cheng has spent a year as a Fulbright fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. They will begin their doctorate in astrophysics at Princeton in the fall. Cheng's previous awards include the Astronaut Scholarship, the MIT Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, the MIT Barrett Prize and the Princeton President’s Fellowship.

Albert Qin

Qin, a first-year graduate student in physics, is working at the boundaries between physics, biology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

“I’m interested in the study of intelligence,” he wrote in the Hertz application. “I want to use data from both biological and artificial systems to answer questions such as: How do neural networks represent the world? How do we learn quickly and flexibly from very few examples? Overall, I’m excited about this field, because I think that we’re in a unique moment where we may be well positioned to gain insights into the nature of intelligence.”

Qin was a double major in mathematics and physics at MIT, graduating in 2024. He said in his application materials that he already knew he wanted to be a professor and teacher, so he took a course in MIT’s teacher certification program and participated for three years in “Splash,” a student-run weekend of STEM outreach to middle and high schoolers.

Qin said that he chose Princeton in part because of its support for interdisciplinary research. “Specifically, I wanted to find a place that had both deep expertise in many different disciplines, and a culture that encourages people from different departments and disciplines to talk to one another,” he said. “There’s a wealth of expertise here that I’m excited about.”