Belgium’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize has been awarded to three professors at Tel Aviv University for their pioneering work on statistics.

Yoav Benjamini, Daniel Yekutieli, and Ruth Heller received the $1 million Rousseeuw Prize in a ceremony at the Catholic University of Leuven on December 3 — despite protests outside the venue, and an academic boycott of Israel at many of the country’s other college campuses.

The two-year-old Rousseeuw Prize is awarded by the King Baudouin Foundation and recognizes outstanding contributions in statistics that profoundly impact science and society. King Baudouin ruled Belgium from 1951, until his death in 1993.

The Israelis were honored for their pioneering methodology for controlling the False Discovery Rate (FDR). Their method allows researchers to distinguish meaningful findings from false discoveries when evaluating large datasets from experiments, helping scientists discover genuine findings.

The breakthrough addresses an age-old dilemma faced by scientists in many disciplines: choose not to report a promising discovery because the results may be due to chance, or go ahead and publish even though the claims are on shaky ground.

Back in 1995, Benjamini and the late Prof. Yosef Hochberg introduced the research world to their concept, known as the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) Procedure.

It allowed researchers to maximize the number of discoveries, particularly in medicine, while keeping the false discovery rate below a specified threshold.

The pair had waited years to publish their findings, because they were so at odds with the prevailing wisdom at the time, but the impact was huge.

Within a decade, the BH Procedure had become one of the 25 most-cited statistical papers globally.

Unlike traditional statistical methods, the BH Procedure allowed for some false positives, as long as their proportion was controlled.

Benjamini, together with his former students Yekutieli and Heller, have since refined and expanded the original BH Procedure beyond medical research to cover genomics, neuroscience and other fields.

“The idea of the FDR originated from the need of medical researchers to examine numerous factors indicating treatment success,” said Benjamini.

“However, in statistics, once a new method is established in one research area, its impact can expand to others.”

In his acceptance speech, Benjamini called for the preservation of scientific collaborations between Israel and other countries, the avoidance of boycotts, and the protection of science from political interference.

He shared the story of family friend Carmel Gat, 40, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, held hostage by Hamas in Gaza for 11 months and then murdered.

Academic boycotts of Israel have been adopted by several Belgian universities: The University of Antwerp, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Ugent, KU Leuven, the University of Ghent and the University of Liège.