On December 17, 2021, David Vanavermaete successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis "Exploring and exploiting genetic variation for balancing short- and long-term genetic gains in plant breeding" and was awarded the title of Doctor of Bioscience Engineering: Mathematical Modelling. David was supervised by Bernard De Baets, Jan Fostier and Steven Maenhout. His jury included the international expert ‪Gregor Gorjanc, affiliated with the Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.