Virtual IME Congress Hosted by Illinois
This first virtual IME international congress was jointly hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, Ulm University, and the University of New South Wales Sydney. It is the first major international insurance research conference hosted by the Department of Mathematics and the University of Illinois.
The virtual conference was held July 5-9, 2021, and featured keynote sessions with presentations by
- Olivia Mitchell, International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
- Ruodo Wang, associate professor in actuarial science and quantitative finance and a university research chair at the University of Waterloo
- Michel Denuit, professor of probability, statistics, and actuarial mathematics at the UCLouvain in Belgium
- Christian Robert, professor of statistics and actuarial science at ENSAE Paris
- Patrick Brockett, Gus S. Wortham Memorial Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Texas, Austin
- Robert Jarrow, Ronald P. and Susan E. Lynch Professor of Investment Management and a professor of finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University
Runhuan Feng, director of the actuarial science program at Illinois, served as lead chair of the conference Organizing Committee.
Actuarial Science to Host Two Prestigious Conferences
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been selected to host two of the most influential international academic conferences in the actuarial community -- the 57th Actuarial Research Conference (ARC) to take place in 2022 and the 28th International Congress on Insurance, Mathematics and Economics (IME) in 2024.
The ARC is one of the premier annual events for actuarial scientists in North America to meet and discuss research problems and solutions in all areas of actuarial practice. It appeals to both academic and practicing actuaries. The IME congress is one of the largest and most prominent meeting series in actuarial science across continents. The first meeting took place in Amsterdam in 1997, and this is only the third time it is has been hosted in the United States (previous meetings in the U.S. were State College, PA, in 2001 and Atlanta in 2016).
The University of Illinois has a long and proud history in actuarial science. It dates back to 1906 when the first actuarial course was created in the Department of Mathematics. Today the program produces close to seven percent of our nation’s graduates in actuarial science each year and boasts one of the largest actuarial alumni networks in the world. We are very excited about the opportunity to showcase the development of actuarial science at the University of Illinois and to raise the awareness and visibility of actuarial research in American universities at the international stage.