Wolf Foundation, Herzog announce 2026 Wolf Prize Laureates in medicine, physics, chemistry, math

The Wolf Foundation and President Isaac Herzog announced the 2026 Wolf Prize laureates at the President's Residence in Jerusalem. Eight scientists were recognized across medicine, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The medicine prize went to Prof. Charles S. Zuker for taste perception research; physics was jointly awarded to Prof. Immanuel Bloch and Prof. Jun Ye for quantum physics work; the mathematics prize was jointly awarded to Prof. David Kazhdan and Prof. Joseph Bernstein.

The Wolf Foundation, alongside President Isaac Herzog and Acting Chair of the Wolf Foundation Council Prof. Osnat Luxenburg, announced the 2026 Wolf Prize laureates at the President's Residence in Jerusalem on Thursday. Eight scientists from around the world were recognized for breakthroughs in medicine, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The Wolf Prize in Medicine was awarded to Columbia University's Prof. Charles S. Zuker for his research on the cells that allow humans to taste different flavors, uncovering that taste perception is determined through neural pathways connected to receptors on the tongue. The Wolf Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to German physicist Prof. Immanuel Bloch and Chinese-born physicist Prof. Jun Ye for their work in quantum physics. Ye led the development of the world's most stable and accurate atomic clocks, while Bloch helped establish quantum simulation as a major field of modern physics. The Wolf Prize in Mathematics was awarded jointly to Israeli mathematicians Prof. David Kazhdan of Hebrew University and Prof. Joseph Bernstein of Tel Aviv University for foundational work on representation theory, automorphic forms, and algebraic geometry. The article does not detail the chemistry prize winners.