Thomas Verdebout obtained his PhD in Statistics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium in 2008. Then, from 2009 to 2014, he has been Assistant Professor at the Université de Lille, France. Since 2014, he is Professor (Associate Professor between 2014 and 2022) of Statistics at the ULB. His main research fields are directional statistics, high dimensional statistics and dimension reduction techniques. He has always been interested in nonparametric methods such as rank-based methods or more recently methods based on optimal transport and in asymptotics in general. He is/has been Associate Editor of Bernoulli, Electronic Journal of Statistics, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis and Statistics and Probability Letters.