Yad Vashem designer Moshe Safdie among winners of Israel’s coveted Wolf Prize

The architect who designed the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem was among the winners of the 2019 Wolf Prize.

Moshe Safdie, 80, chosen for architecture, was one of five recipients honored Wednesday at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. The Wolf Prize is given by the president of Israel on behalf of the Wolf Foundation. About one-third of the winners have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize, most notably in physics.

Each year the Wolf Foundation awards $100,000 prizes in five fields.

This year’s other winners are Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University, who won the prize in medicine for his research on the human endocrine system,

The prize in mathematics went to Gregory Lawler, of the University of Chicago, and Prof. Jean-Francois Le Galle, of the University Paris-Sud Orsay, for their work in probability theory and the theory of stochastic processes, respectively.

In agriculture, the prize went to David Zilberman, of the University of California, for his work in developing economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks in agriculture.

The chemistry prize went to Stephen L Buchwald of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and John F Hartwig, of the University of California, Berkeley, for their independent work in cross coupling for the making of carbon-heteroatom bonds.

President Reuven Rivlin noted that no women were named this year.

“The Foundation would do well to make sure that each year they find a groundbreaking woman scientist and artist, who certainly exist, and award her a prize,” he said.