Yoav Benjamini

Yoav Benjamini was born in 1949 in Israel

Yoav Benjamini was born in Israel on 5 January 1949 to Yosef and Tova. He attended the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and then served in the IDF in the Nahal.

He studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and graduated in 1973. After reserve service in the Yom Kippur War, he earned a master's degree in mathematics there in 1976, under Israel Aumann. He then went to Princeton University, where a course with John Tukey drew him to statistics, and he received his PhD in statistics in 1981.

In 1980 he began teaching at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1981 he joined the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University. He became a full professor in 2000 and headed the department from 2003 to 2006. He also served as president of the Israeli Statistical Association from 2007 to 2009.

In 1989 he developed the false discovery rate method with Yosef Hochberg, a way to handle multiple comparisons, and it was published in 1995. Since the 2000s he has also worked on the problem of reproducibility in science. He received the Israel Prize in 2012 and shared the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in 2024 with Ruth Heller and Daniel Yekutieli.

He is married to Yael and has three children and nine grandchildren. His son Yuval Benjamini is a professor of statistics and data science at the Hebrew University.