On February 5, 2026, Lixuan An successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis "Analysis of exceedance patterns in distributional tails based on Extreme Value Theory" and was awarded the title of Doctor of Bioscience Engineering: Mathematical Modelling. Lixuan was supervised by Bernard De Baets and Stijn Luca. The research of Lixuan was supported by the China Scholarship Council and Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds van Universiteit Gent.