By the Princeton Office of Communications
The Hertz Foundation announced that Tyler Hou and Zachary Siegel are among the 19 fellowship recipients in its 2026 cohort of Hertz Fellows. Tyler Hou is an incoming graduate student in computer science. Siegel, of the Class of 2025, is currently a graduate student in computer science at MIT.
Two other Princetonians were also named fellows: Elizabeth Kozlov, a current graduate student in astrophysics and Zain Zaidi, a current Princeton graduate student in theoretical and computational chemistry.
The competitive Hertz Fellowship provides up to five years of financial support for doctoral studies in the applied sciences, engineering and mathematics, including full tuition and an annual stipend, along with membership in a community of scientists and engineers working across disciplines.
“The strength of the Hertz Fellowship has always been its commitment to the long view — supporting fellows not just through graduate school but throughout their lives,” said Wendy Connors, president of the Hertz Foundation, in the fellowship announcement. “The 2026 class joins a community that spans generations and disciplines, and we are committed to their success.”
Tyler Hou
Hou, an undergraduate in mathematics and computer science at the University of California-Berkeley, applies logic and algebra to improve programming languages and distributed systems. He will begin doctoral studies at Princeton in the Department of Computer Science this fall.
After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Hou worked on the search performance team at Google. He has also been a teaching assistant and volunteer at JamCoders, a free summer programming camp in Kingston, Jamaica, for high school students.
Zachary Siegel
Siegel, of Princeton’s Class of 2025, is a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works on robotics and cognitive science, including artificial intelligence.
At MIT, Siegel is working to design robotic systems that can learn from limited data and combine skills in new ways to solve new problems. At Princeton, he completed a B.S.E. in computer science and earned a certificate in philosophy. His college honors included Tau Beta Pi (the engineering honors society), Sigma Xi (the scientific honors society) and the Outstanding Computer Science Independent Work Prize.