Meet the Schmidt Science Fellows for 2023.
Eric and Wendy Schmidt have announced the Schmidt Science Fellows for 2023. This year’s cohort of 32 Fellows are all recent PhD’s who’ve been identified as some of the most outstanding early-career scientists in the world.
The Schmidt Science Fellows was the first program supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative co-founded by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, President of the Schmidt Family Foundation. The current class is the sixth cohort in the program, which is fully funded by Schmidt Futures and delivered in a partnership with the Rhodes Trust.
Considered one of the most prestigious scientific postdoctoral awards in the world, Schmidt Science Fellows are awarded support for either one or two years in a field of study that pivots from their Ph.D concentration. In addition to an annual stipend of $100,000, they receive individualized mentoring and participation in the program’s Global Meeting Series, which provides training, introductions to new concepts, visits to leading interdisciplinary scientific centers, and opportunities to engage with thought-leaders from science, business, policy, and society.
The new Schmidt Science Fellows join prior Fellows, now totaling 145 recipients from 34 nationalities. This year’s group includes the first nationals from Brazil, Ecuador, Nigeria, and Macedonia and the first Fellows to be nominated from Brazilian and Indian universities.
The new cohort was selected based on their scientific achievements, talent, leadership characteristics, and commitment to harnessing interdisciplinary science, as well as their potential to address global challenges, including climate destruction, neurodegenerative disease, and food insecurity and to improve mental health, drug discovery, energy security, and physical rehabilitation.
Commenting on the new Fellows, Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and president of The Schmidt Family Foundation, said: "History provides powerful examples of what happens when scientists are given the freedom to ask big questions which can achieve real breakthroughs across disciplines. Schmidt Science Fellows are tackling climate destruction, discovering new drugs against disease, developing novel materials, using machine learning to understand the drivers of human health, and much more. This new cohort will add to this legacy in applying scientific discovery to improve human health and opportunity, and preserve and restore essential planetary systems."
In the official announcement of the fellows, Dr. Megan Kenna, Executive Director of Schmidt Science Fellows, added, "Interdisciplinary approaches bring together different perspectives, people, techniques, and insights, meaning we solve bigger problems, faster. I am delighted that this diversity of perspectives is reflected in our community, with 11 new nominating universities seeing Fellows selected, including our first from institutions in Brazil and India, and 14 nationalities represented in this year's group."
The 2023 Schmidt Science Fellows and their nominating institutions are:
- Raymond Adkins - University of California, Santa Barbara
- T. Bertie Ansell - University of Oxford
- Vesna Bacheva - Technion Israel Institute of Technology
- Yinon Bar-On - Weizmann Institute of Science
- Daril Brown - University of California, San Diego
- Joshua Chen - Rice University
- Lillian Chin - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Shizhong Dai - University of California, San Francisco
- Neil Dalvie - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Yotam Feldman - Tel Aviv University
- Asim Gazi - Georgia Institute of Technology
- Andrew Hunt - Northwestern University
- Ahyoung Kim - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Sahil Loomba - Imperial College London
- Cecília Magalhães - Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
- Juan Martinez Mori - Cornell University
- Ariane Mora - University of Queensland
- Charlotte Newton - University of Cambridge
- Suong Nguyen - Princeton University
- Solomon Oyakhire - Stanford University
- Kira Podolsky - University of California, San Diego
- Shilpa Pothapragada - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
- Krishnakant Saboo - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Susmita Sarkar - Purdue University
- Michael Schoof - University of California, San Francisco
- Amy Strilchuk - University of British Columbia
- Sridevi Venkatesan - University of Toronto
- Julian Vigil - Stanford University
- Yanbo Wang - Johns Hopkins University
- Yuanqing Wang - Cornell University
- Matthias Wurdack - Australian National University
- Yirui Zhang - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
About Schmidt Futures
Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, that’s focused on “finding the right people, bringing them together into networks, and focusing their talent on specific challenges. Then we help them access the tools and resources they need to prove out and scale ideas that make the world better.”
Schmidt Futures uses gifts, grants, other capital structures, and startup activity — for charitable, educational, and commercial work aimed at discovering promising scientific breakthroughs and other ideas in technology and then scaling those efforts to improve people’s lives.
