Congratulations to Our Newest PhD Graduate, Dr. Steven Barnett!

The Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech is proud to announce and celebrate the successful completion of Dr. Steven Barnett's doctoral degree requirements.

Dr. Steven Barnett successfully defended his dissertation titled "Scalable surrogates for counts and computer experiments" on January 30, 2026, a significant milestone representing years of rigorous work, dedication, and impactful research.

Steven developed fully Bayesian, Vecchia-approximated, Poisson deep Gaussian processes, a novel methodology for modeling large-scale count data from a nonstationary mean response surface. Additionally, he introduced a new framework for computer model calibration, pairing count data with high-dimensional output from an expensive computer simulator to further heliospheric theory development and validation.

Steven collaborated closely with space scientists and statisticians at Los Alamos National Laboratory throughout his graduate program on data collected by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite. 

Dr. Steven Barnett will be joining the Statistics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Research Scientist.