Investigators

Project Leader

Ken Seng Tan, Ph.D., ASA, CERA (Principal Investigator), is University Research Chair Professor of the University of Waterloo and the Associate Director of the Waterloo Research Institute in Insurance, Securities and Quantitative Finance. Formerly he held the Canada Research Chair Professor in Quantitative Risk Management (2005-2010) in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr. Tan was a founding council member of the Joint Risk Management section of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and he was subsequently re-elected for the period 2004-2007. He was the elected council member of the SOA Education and Research Section 2007-2010.  

Currently, he is the co-editor of North American Actuarial Journal (NAAJ) and the Associate Editor of the Annals of Actuarial Science. He has authored many research articles in actuarial science, insurance and finance, and he publishes in leading actuarial, finance and mathematics journals. Dr. Tan has received several awards, including the 1996-97 Redington Prize, the NAAJ Annual Prizes 2001 and 2003, and the 2012 Charles A. Hachemeister. In 2007 he was among the few actuaries to be granted the first Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA) credential by the SOA, based on his years of leadership in the field of enterprise risk management.

Team Members

Carole Bernard, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Waterloo. She holds a Ph.D. in finance and a Master's in financial and actuarial sciences from the University of Lyon 1. Carole has published articles in leading international journals, such as Journal of Risk and Insurance, Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, Journal of Economics Dynamics and Control, European Journal of Operational Research, and Journal of Applied Probability, among others.

Her main research interests are quantitative behavioral finance, equity-linked insurance, volatility derivatives, optimal insurance and reinsurance, pricing and hedging exotic derivatives and risk management.

She was recently awarded the 2011 EGRIE Young Economist Best Paper Award for the paper "Financial bounds for Insurance Claims" with Steven Vanduffel and the 2012 Johann de Witt prize from the Dutch Actuarial Society for the paper "Explicit Representation of Cost-Efficient Strategies" with P. Boyle and S. Vanduffel.

CV : Carole Bernard CV

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Phelim Boyle, Ph.D., FIA, FCIA



 

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Mary Hardy, Ph.D., FIA, FSA, CERA



 

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Adam Kolkiewicz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include methods of hedging of path-dependent financial and insurance products, pricing American and Bermudan options and numerical methods for high-dimensional integration problems. He is the Director of the Master of Quantitative Finance program at the University of Waterloo.

CV : Adam Kolkiewicz CV (PDF)

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Johnny Li, Ph.D., FSA



 

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David Saunders, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of many articles on the subjects of risk management, portfolio optimization and derivatives pricing, and regularly serves as a consultant for financial institutions and software companies.

 

CV : David Saunders CV (PDF)

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Chengguo Weng, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. Professor Weng's primary research interests lie in developing effective quantitative tools in evaluating and managing risks in the fields of insurance and finance. Currently he is particularly interested in the following topics:

1. optimal decision in finance and insurance; 
2. portfolio management with guaranteed features; 
3. stochastic modelling in finance and actuarial science; 
4. statistical inference and modelling with copulas.

CV : Chengguo Weng CV (PDF)

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Tony Wirjanto, Ph.D., is a trained econometrician working in finance and finance related areas.

"In 1990, 2000 and 2001, I was commissioned by the Bank of Canada to provide assessment on Canadian financial markets and projections for future financial market conditions in Canada. In 1997, I was commissioned by Thailand Development Research Institute to restructure Thailand’s financial market post financial crisis. In 1997, I was commissioned by Harvard University to assist Indonesia to restructure its Six Year Economic Plan and South Korea to restructure its financial market post financial crisis.

In 1999 and 2003, I was commissioned by Finance Canada to assist in developing the federal government’s budgets related to financial markets. In 2006, I was commissioned by OECD to conduct assessment of the financial markets of the OECD member countries. In 2011-12, I was commissioned by Manulife Financial to develop statistical models for calibrating stochastic parameters used to model reserves and capital requirements for segregated funds. In 2012-2013, I was commissioned by the Global Risk Institute in Financial Services to study the risk-taking activities of Canadian financial institutions that include banks, life insurance and pension plan companies and asset management sector, in the prolonged low interest rate environment." - Tony Wirjanto