TAU researchers receive $1m statistics prize at Belgian university despite boycott calls

Three researchers from Tel Aviv University officially received the prestigious Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics at a ceremony held last week at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, where “protests by students and faculty members have called for a full academic boycott of Israeli universities,” TAU says in a press release.

Prof. Yoav Benjamini, Prof. Daniel Yekutieli and Prof. Ruth Heller from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research were given the award for their work on the False Discovery Rate (FDR), a statistical methodology for discovering errors among large datasets first described by Benjamini and the late professor Yosef Hochberg in the 1990s.

The award, which was designed to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for statistical research, is overseen by the King Baudouin Foundation and comes with a $1 million prize. The TAU winners were first announced in August.

The award ceremony was conducted without incident, although “outside the building where the ceremony took place, students distributed flyers advocating for a comprehensive boycott, similar to the policies adopted by other Belgian universities,” the TAU statement noted.

In a speech accepting the award, Benjamini emphasized “the importance of science as a bridge between societies” and called for “the preservation of scientific collaborations, avoidance of boycotts, and protection of science from political interference.”