Two Israeli Professors Among Eight Recipients of Prestigious Wolf Prize

Eight scientists, including two professors from Israel, have been selected as the 2026 recipients of the Wolf Prize, Israel's most prestigious award. The announcement was made at an event in Jerusalem attended by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog and Acting Chair of the Wolf Foundation, Professor Osnat Luxenburg. The laureates will formally receive their awards in June 2027 at the Knesset.

In Mathematics, Professors David Kazhdan of the Hebrew University and Yosef Bernstein of Tel Aviv University will be honored for their foundational work in representation theory, automorphic forms, and algebraic geometry, and their contributions to geometric representation theory. The prize committee noted that their groundbreaking ideas have fundamentally changed mathematicians' understanding of connections between different mathematical fields, bridging algebra, geometry, and analysis, and laying the groundwork for geometric representation theory, a central area of modern mathematics. Their tools and concepts are considered cornerstones in mathematical research.

Professor Kazhdan, born in Moscow in 1946, is recognized for his significant contributions to representation theory, including the development of the Kazhdan-Lustig polynomial and formulating key conjectures. He is a recipient of the Israel Prize, the EMET Prize, the Rothschild Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. Professor Bernstein, also born in Moscow in 1945, is acclaimed for his work in representation theory and automorphic forms, including the development of the Bernstein-Sato polynomial and his research on perverse sheaves. He immigrated to Israel in 1993.

In Medicine, Professor Charles Zucker of Columbia University is recognized for revolutionizing the understanding of the sense of taste, identifying the cells and receptors responsible for detecting the five basic tastes and elucidating how this information is processed in the brain. In Physics, Professors Emmanuel Bloch of the University of Munich and John Ye of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. will receive the award for their pioneering achievements in controlling ultra-cold atomic systems and their applications in quantum simulation and optical atomic clocks.

The Chemistry prize will be awarded to Professors Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman of the University of Cambridge, UK, along with Professor Pascal Mayer of France, for developing cost-effective, large-scale DNA sequencing methods that have advanced genomic medicine. The Wolf Prize, established by Ricardo Wolf, a German-born Cuban diplomat and industrialist, is awarded annually in physics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, agriculture, and arts, and is often seen as a predictor of Nobel Prize winners.