Three Tel Aviv University researchers received a $1 million prize in statistics last week, with the award ceremony held at a Belgian university despite calls for an academic boycott of Israel.
The King Baudouin Foundation awarded the prestigious Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics to professors Yoav Benjamini, Daniel Yekutieli and Ruth Heller from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at TAU for their pioneering work on the False Discovery Rate (FDR).
TAU noted in its Wednesday press release that the biannual award is Belgium’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize for statistics.
Outside the building on the campus of the Catholic University of Leuven on Dec. 3, students distributed flyers calling for a comprehensive boycott of Israeli universities, part of an ongoing campaign to isolate the Jewish state led by faculty and students.
Since the war in Gaza initiated by the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, academics and students at Belgian universities have called for a boycott, while Ghent University, the University of Antwerp and Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel have severed ties with Israeli research institutions.
Benjamini spoke at the ceremony, highlighting the role of science as a bridge connecting societies. He urged the preservation of scientific collaborations, the rejection of boycotts, and the safeguarding of science from political influence.
He recounted the story of Carmel Gat, a family friend who was kidnapped on Oct, 7 and subsequently murdered in Gaza. Benjamini noted the ongoing protests in Israel advocating for a deal to secure the release of hostages and bring an end to the war.
“The idea of the FDR originated from the need of medical researchers to examine numerous factors indicating treatment success. However, in statistics, once a new method is established in one research area, its impact can expand to others,” he said.
“Indeed, FDR methods are now widely applied in diverse fields such as: genomics—where relations between tens of thousands of genetic markers of a specific disease are examined; neuroscience—testing which regions in the brain are activated when a certain task, such as face recognition, is performed; agriculture; economics; behavioral sciences; astronomy; and more,” Benjamini said.
“What these fields share is the need to scan massive amounts of possible results within mountains of data to identify significant discoveries,” he said.
