Yoav Benjamini


Yoav Benjamini is an Israeli statistician best known for the development of the false discovery rate criterion and the Benjamini–Hochberg (BH) and Benjamini–Yekutieli (BY) procedures for controlling the FDR rate. He is currently The Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at Tel Aviv University.
He won the Israel Prize in 2012 and the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in 2024.

Early life

Yoav graduated high school from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1966 and later studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem graduating in 1973. His master's degree in mathematics is from the same university in 1976. In 1981, he received his PhD in statistics from Princeton University in the United States.

Career

In 1981, he joined the faculty of the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University, and in 2000, he was promoted to full professor. From 2003 to 2006, he served as head of the department, from 2006 to 2011, as head of the Statistical Consulting Laboratory, and from 2009, as head of the Chair of Applied Statistics. From 2001 to 2003, he served as vice president of the Israeli Statistical Association, and from 2007 to 2009, he served as president of the association. In 2011, he was on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

Scientific fields of interest

Benjamini's scientific work combines theoretical research in statistical methodology with applied research that involves complex problems with massive data. The methodological work is on selective and simultaneous inference, as well as on general methods for data analysis, data mining, and data visualization. His research citations from Google Scholar exceed 100,000.

Personal life

He is the father of three children, and the grandfather of nine grandchildren. His son, Yuval Benjamini, is a professor of statistics and data science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Honors and awards

Publications