Physics grad students Herzog-Arbeitman ’19 and Longenecker win $250,000 Hertz fellowships
The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced that Princeton graduate students Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman and Daniel Longenecker are two of the 13 recipients of the prestigious 2022 Hertz Fellowships in applied science, mathematics and engineering.
The fellows, selected from a pool of more than 650 applicants from across the nation, will receive a stipend and full tuition support valued at more than $250,000 for up to five years of graduate study.
“To remain a global leader in science and technology, our nation requires enterprising minds capable of inventing creative solutions to real problems,” said Robbee Baker Kosak, president of the Hertz Foundation. “We’re thrilled to be able to support these promising innovators and fuel their research at such a pivotal time in their careers.”
Launched in 1963, the Hertz Fellowship has supported more than 1,200 scientists and engineers who collectively hold more than 3,000 patents, have founded more than 375 companies, and have received hundreds of major national and international awards, including two Nobel Prizes, eight Breakthrough Prizes, the National Medal of Technology, the Fields Medal and the Turing Award.
Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman
Jonah Herzog Arbeitman
Herzog-Arbeitman, a member of the Class of 2019 who is now a first-year graduate student at Princeton University, is a condensed matter physicist working toward the discovery of new states of matter and the development of quantum materials to solve long-standing problems. He has published 13 papers in journals including two in Nature Physics and four in Physical Review Letters — one based on research from his first summer at Princeton.
“Taking inspiration from people like Bohr and Schrodinger has never been more important, as we look for the next leap of faith that will take us from the quantum mechanics of the last hundred years to that of the next hundred years,” he said. “The projects I’m working on are the theoretical cusp of what we think to be a revolution in engineering devices using topology and quantum mechanics.”
As an undergraduate at Princeton, Herzog-Arbeitman studied physics, math and poetry. In 2019, he received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford and Cambridge, earning master’s degrees from both institutions before returning to Princeton for graduate school.
At Princeton, he has been active in mentorship programs and the physics department’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. He is dedicated to diversifying academia, encouraging undergraduates to pursue physics and demystifying the path to a career in research. In his bio for the Hertz Foundation, he mentioned that he has “a twin, two moms and a very furry dog.”
Daniel Longenecker
Daniel Longenecker
Longenecker, also a first-year graduate student in physics, studies scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory and string theory. He hopes to contribute to the reformulation of quantum field theory by discovering new principles and mathematical structures.
“I’m so excited to be part of the Hertz community and to be able to meet other Hertz Fellows who are scholars with deep knowledge in their field and who also want to change the world.”
Longenecker received his BA in physics and physics education in 2021 from Cornell University. Deeply interested in all aspects of education, he has held numerous teaching roles both at Cornell and at Princeton, and he hopes to start a company to provide educational access for underprivileged children around the world.
Born in Maryland, he moved to Kuwait with his family when he was 5 years old. School closures caused by the Iraq war in 2003 led to him being homeschooled until college. Outside of academic pursuits, Longenecker enjoys traveling the world with his wife, Addison. He has visited 25 countries so far.