Actuarial science is an interdisciplinary research area that focuses on the quantification, assessment and managing of risks and uncertainty arising from insurance and financial industries.
There are many ways of classifying research topics in actuarial science, one of which is based on areas of practice in the actuarial profession, such as
- Life and annuities
- Property and casualty
- Pension and retirement planning
- Healthcare
- Finance and investment
- Enterprise risk management
However, as a scientific discipline, actuarial science is more broadly defined and extends beyond traditional boundaries of areas of actuarial practice. Researchers are at the forefront of expanding actuarial knowledge and developing cutting edge analytical and statistical techniques in a wide range of topics, including predictive modeling, asset and liability management, dependency modeling, etc.
Housed in the Department of Mathematics, known for its world-renowned probabilists, the Illinois Actuarial Science Program is a unique place for the coalescence of world-class mathematical education and actuarial research.
Our actuarial faculty members are actively involved in a wide range of research projects, many of which are sponsored by the Society of Actuaries and the Actuarial Foundation. The actuarial science group also leads the I-Risk Lab which provides educational and research activities to provide innovative solutions for industry problems emerging in the areas of actuarial science, quantitative finance and advance analytics for risk management.
Faculty
Runhuan Feng – quantitative risk management, applied stochastic processes, equity-linked insurance, asset and liability management, nested stochastic modeling, exotic option pricing.
Frank Quan – tree-based models, text mining and natural language processing, data science application in insurance, social media research.
Richard Sowers (Mathematics and ISE) – interaction of randomness and dynamics in various applied problems
Our actuarial science faculty members also collaborate on both educational and research projects with faculty members in Departments of Statistics, Industrial Systems and Enterprise Engineering, and Finance.
Faculty in Related Areas
Georgios Fellouris (Statistics) – sequential hypothesis testing, decision making under communication constraints, educational measurement and cognitive assessment, epidemic detection.
Liming Feng (ISE) – quantitative finance, Stochastic Modeling and Operations Research
Bo Li (statistics) – spatio-temporal modeling, Bayesian hierarchical modeling, copula methods, large data analysis in climatology, atmospheric and environmental science, time series data analysis
Xiaofeng Shao (Statistics) – econometrics, functional data analysis, resampling methods, spatial statistics, time series, applications in atmospheric science, economics, finance and neuroscience
Renming Song (Mathematics) – stochastic analysis, Markov processes, branching processes and potential theory.
Alexey G. Stepanov (Statistics) – stochastic processes, financial modeling, actuarial analysis
Research Seminars
Actuarial Science and Financial Mathematics Seminar
Mathematical Finance, Risk and Uncertainty Seminar