Dr Tali Dekel received the prestigious Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels and Smart Mobility the first lady to earn it since the award’s inception in 2013 in Israel.

Dr Dekel – a senior research scientist for tech giant Google in Cambridge, Massachusettsis one of four award recipients this year who will be sharing US$1 million, which stands as the world’s largest monetary award in their fields.

She received the prize under the new category of Researcher Recruitment, which is given to leading global researchers who will be committed to becoming full faculty members in the Israeli academia for at least four years; Dr Dekel has been recruited to join the mathematics and computer science department at the Weizmann Institute of Israel next year.

The other recipient of the prize under the same category is Professor Leonard J. Shulman, who will be taking his knowledge of algorithms, coding, and quantum computation to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Both recipients are expected in the coming years to contribute to research in the areas of smart mobility and alternative fuels, two such fields considered important to Israel’s growth.