Yoav Benjamini, the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University and former Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics, has won the 2024 Rousseeuw Prize.

Benjamini is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. His research topics are selective and simultaneous inference, replicability and reproducibility in science, and data mining, with applications in biostatistics, bioinformatics, animal behavior, brain imaging, and health informatics. He served as a visiting professor at Berkeley at the invitation of former chair and current professor Bin Yu.

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics recognizes a statistical innovation that is an outstanding contribution or tool that has had a significant impact and found wide application in statistical practice relevant to society. The prize focuses on innovation rather than on a single individual. This allows the prize to recognize several individuals who made important contributions to it. Ruth Heller and Daniel Yekutieli of Tel-Aviv University were recognized as well. 

Benjamini received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics, is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and received the Karl Pearson Prize in 2019.

(Photo credit: MIT Press)

-Alex Coughlin