Rate My Professor Tom Berrett

Thomas Berrett is an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick. He earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of Cambridge in January 2018 under the supervision of Professor Richard J. Samworth. His PhD thesis, "Modern k-nearest neighbour methods in entropy estimation, independence testing and classification," exemplifies his expertise in nonparametric methods.

After his PhD, Berrett served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge until August 2019, affiliated with the StatScale programme, and subsequently at CREST, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris until July 2020, supervised by Professor Cristina Butucea. He has been at Warwick since then, progressing to his current position. Berrett's research interests include developing statistical theory and methodology in nonparametric settings, estimation of entropy and other functionals, (conditional) independence testing and classification, nearest neighbour methods and permutation tests, local privacy constraints in statistics, and missing data problems. His publications appear in premier journals like the Annals of Statistics and Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Key papers include "Tests of Missing Completely At Random based on sample covariance matrices" (with A. Bordino, Annals of Statistics, 2025), "Nonparametric classification with missing data" (with T. Sell and T. I. Cannings, Annals of Statistics, 2024), "Efficient functional estimation and the super-oracle phenomenon" (with R. J. Samworth, Annals of Statistics, 2023), and "USP: an independence test that improves on Pearson's chi-squared and the G-test" (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2021). With over 1,100 citations on Google Scholar, his work has substantial influence.

Berrett's achievements are recognized by awards such as the ERC Starting Grant (October 2024–September 2029), Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award 2023 (Honourable Mention), EPSRC New Investigator Award (2022–2024), Royal Statistical Society Research Prize 2020, and IMS New Researcher Travel Award 2020. He serves as Intercalated Year Coordinator for 2025/26 and contributes R packages like MCARtest and USP to CRAN.