The King of Belgium's Baudouin Science Foundation awarded the prestigious Rousseau Prize in Statistics to Prof. Yoav Binyamini, Prof. Daniel Yekuthiali and Prof. Ruth Heller from the Department of Statistics and Performance Research at Tel Aviv University for their pioneering work on the false discovery rate. The value of the prize is one million dollars
The King of Belgium's Baudouin Science Foundation awarded the prestigious Rousseau Prize in Statistics to Prof. Yoav Binyamini, Prof. Daniel Yekuthiali and Prof. Ruth Heller from the Department of Statistics and Performance Research at Tel Aviv University for their pioneering work on the False Discovery Rate (FDR)). The $2024 million prize has been awarded every even-numbered year since XNUMX, and honors outstanding statistical contributions that have a profound impact on society.
The award was given to the winners for their work that allows to scan a large number of experimental results and find out from them actual discoveries, with the number of false discoveries being limited. In the article by Prof. Yoav Binyamini and the late Prof. Yossi Hochberg, the two presented the false discovery rate criterion, gave it a mathematical expression, and even proposed a method that allows finding as many discoveries as possible while maintaining a desired FDR. Their article conflicted with accepted criteria and was delayed for years until its publication, but today it is one of the most cited articles in science. Binyamini was joined by his students Yekothiali and Heller, who together and separately continued to add to and innovate the theory of FDR methods. Their work made it possible to expand the ability to use the Benjamini-Hoberg method beyond the original article, to generalize the FDR approach to challenges in genomics and brain research and to propose methods for evaluating whether scientific findings can be reproduced by others.
Prof. Yoav Binyamini: "The idea of FDR was born out of the need for research in medicine in which a large number of characteristics of treatment success are tested. But in statistics, as soon as a new approach and method is formed in one research field, its influence can expand to other fields. Indeed, the use of FDR methods is common in fields as diverse as genomics, where relationships are examined Among the tens of thousands of genetic markers for a certain disease, brain research, which examines which area of the brain is active when performing a certain task such as face recognition, Agriculture, economics, behavioral sciences, astronomy, etc. What they have in common is the need to scan a huge number of possible results from mountains of data, in order to make discoveries.
"I am happy and excited about the current evaluation of our research, but winning the Rousseau Prize is the result of a long process that was sown and grown in Israel, on a fertile academic platform. I hope that even in these difficult days, Israeli society will allow the academy to continue to maintain an open and healthy environment, which will allow growth in the future as well." Prof. Benjamin concluded.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- Prof. Noga Alon and Prof. Yossi Matias from Tel Aviv University won the prestigious Kanalkis Award of the ACM
- Prof. Nathan Nelson from Tel Aviv University won the Israel Prize in the field of life sciences research
- Prof. Yossi Shilo from Tel Aviv University won the prestigious award of the American Association for Cancer Research
- Prof. Uri Cheshnovsky from Tel Aviv University and Prof. Dan Toufik from the Weizmann Institute were chosen as recipients of the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences
- Professor Zvi Maza is the recipient of the Israel Prize in the field of physics research for 2024 - an overview of his main discoveries
