Rodriques, who also won a Churchill Scholarship earlier this year, will use the generous award, valued at over $250,000, to support graduate studies at M.I.T.
It has been a remarkable year so far for Samuel Rodriques '13. In January, the physics major learned that he had won the highly competitive Churchill Scholarship, which will fund a one-year program of graduate study at Cambridge University. Then, in April, Rodriques got word that he had received an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and had been named a 2013 Hertz Fellow.
Rodriques was one of just 15 students selected from a pool of over 700 applicants for the Hertz Graduate Fellowship Award, which is given by The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. Valued at more than $250,000 per student, the Fellowship offers the most generous support in the nation for graduate education in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. Funding lasts up to five years, and does not have traditional research funding restrictions, giving Fellows the freedom to innovate.
The aim of the Fellowship, according to the Foundation, is to support“the Ph.D.-directed effort of the young men and women who can be expected to have the greatest impact on the application of the physical sciences to human problems during the next half-century.”
Rodriques, who is interested in how advances in computational power can aid our understanding of the brain, plans to defer the Hertz for one year, while he pursues an M.Phil. in computational biology at the University of Cambridge with his Churchill Fellowship. He will then use the Hertz funding to support a five-year Ph.D. program at M.I.T., where he has already been accepted.
