On January 31, 2025, Matthys Lucas Steyn successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis "Open-set recognition using extreme value theory", and was awarded the joint degree of Doctor of Bioscience Engineering: Mathematical Modelling (Ghent University) and Doctor of Mathematical Statistics (Stellenbosch University, South Africa). The research was supervised by Tertius de Wet (Stellenbosch University), and Stijn Luca and Bernard De Baets (Ghent University).