We are very happy to announce that Paul Rognon-Vael successfully defended his PhD thesis at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) on 20 April 2026.

His thesis, Improving Variable Selection Properties by Leveraging External Data, was supervised by David Rossell and Piotr Zwiernik as part of the PhD programme in Statistics. The defense was held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics (FME), UPC.

In his thesis, Paul explored how external data can help improve variable selection methods, an important topic in modern statistics with broad relevance in high-dimensional data analysis.

Congratulations, Paul, on this wonderful achievement.