Incredible! South African Man Achieves PhD in the Netherlands

Gavin van der Nest, an alumnus of Tom Newby School and St Dunstan’s College, was awarded a PhD in Statistics from Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
As reported by Benoni City Times, Van der Nest successfully defended his thesis, “Hidden Depths – Robustness of Modelling Approaches for Uncovering Latent Classes of Longitudinal Data”, in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences on 21 December.

According to the university’s website, the thesis examined the performance of a class of statistical models known as finite mixture models in revealing hidden classes of subjects with distinctive development patterns.

Van der Nest is an assistant professor at the university and holds an MSc in Economics from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from the University of Pretoria.

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Picture: Gavin van der Nest