A Westport student at MIT, Alex Siegenfeld, was among 12 persons announced Tuesday as recipients of the prestigious Hertz Fellowship worth $250,000 from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.
Alex Siegenfeld: studying physics. Contributed photo
Each fellowship consists of up to five years of financial, mentoring and community support as well as research freedom at a participating U.S. graduate institution.
Siegenfeld attended the Pierrepont School in Westport where he finished second as a middle schooler in a statewide math competition. He then went on to the Hopkins School in New Haven where he won a gold medal in the International Chemistry Olympiad in Tokyo. (See WestportNow Aug. 2, 2010)
The announcement said at MIT he is “interested in combining chemical intuition with mathematical rigor to further the understanding of materials with exotic and useful properties.”
It added: “As an undergraduate at MIT, he created a model that explained an unusual inverse melting electronic phase transition in strontium-doped lanthanum nickelate, a material similar in structure to the cuprate superconductors.
“He also conducted research on topological insulators, a recently discovered class of substances that have great technological potential due to their being insulating in the interior but conducting on the surface.”
In high school, Siegenfeld was said to take piano lessons and occasionally compose a song or two.
His hobbies were listed as including reading “random things” about chemistry/science, playing chess, playing bridge and occasionally playing tennis or table tennis.
