April 2019: Benjamini wins the Pearson Prize

Prof. Yoav Benjamini, Edmond J. Safra member, Chair of Applied Statistics and an Israel Prize laureate, was awarded the prestigious 2019 Pearson Prize for the Benjamini-Hochberg 1995 paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society entitled: “Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing”.

 

 

 

This paper, cited more than 50,000 times, introduced the false discovery rate or FDR, which is widely used in diverse sciences to make simultaneous inference about a large number of hypotheses. FDR liberalizes the threshold for identifying hypotheses worth further investigation while at the same time controlling the rate of false discoveries. It has become an essential part of the analysis pipeline of complex data around the world. The method serves today many fields of research, including bioinformatics, and its importance is growing in the era of Big Data.  In addition to its wide applicability, the FDR paper includes elegant mathematical statistics.

 

 

The Carl Pearson Prize was established in 2013, in collaboration with the World Statistical Congress and the Elsevier Scientific Publishing House. The prize is awarded every two years for a scientific contribution that has profoundly influenced the theory, methodology, or application of statistics.