On, July 14-15, 2018, the READI Project hosted a Workshop on Applied Research and Theory Based Research.
The workshop was led by Professor Edward W. (Jed) Frees, who is the emeritus Hickman-Larson Chair of Actuarial Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics in 1983 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a Fellow of both the Society of Actuaries (SoA) and the American Statistical Association (the only Fellow of both organizations). Professor Frees has provided extensive service to the profession, including serving as the founding chairperson of the SoA Education and Research Section, a member of the SoA Board of Directors, a Trustee of the Actuarial Foundation, the Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal, and as an actuarial representative to the Social Security Advisory Board’s Technical Panel on Methods and Assumptions.
At the UW School of Business, he served as Associate Dean for Research and Ph.D. Programs. He has written three books; his most recent was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press, entitled Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications. He has won the Society of Actuaries’ Annual Prize for best paper published by the Society, the SoA’s Ed Lew Award for research in modeling, the Casualty Actuarial Society’s Hachmeister award, and the Halmstad Prize for best paper published in the actuarial literature (four times).
There were forty-four participants in total at the workshop, which consisted of regulators, lecturers, PhD and master’s students, as well as insurance industry partners, who showed great interest in the research program. The goal of the workshop is to introduce research-based learning on actuarial science. A higher number of good quality proposal submissions to the Actuarial Science Applied Research Program is expected due to the workshop training.
