News

The University of Waterloo and the Risk Managment, Economic Sustainability, and Actuarial Science Development in Indonesia (READI) are planning to graduate 745 actuarial science students in Indonesia by 2021.  These students will hopefully improve the already growing insurance industry in Indonesia by adding a fresh perspective on changing risk mitigation in a world of unpredictable risks. 

This cohert of students could not come at a better time. Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, is currently sinking at an alarming rate as rising sea levels are threating the city, while many of it's inhabitants are uninsured.   

Read the full story on WIRED's website.

The Risk Management, Economic Sustainability and Actuarial Science (READI) Project has helped launch a government initiative launched in April that regulates the implementation of co-operative education in Indonesia.

This initiative is part of the work that READI, housed in Waterloo’s Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, has been undertaking in Indonesia.

Read the full article on the Daily Bulletin. 

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is pleased to announce Chao Qi (George) Li as the winner of the Samuel Eckler Medal in Actuarial Science.

Award description: 

This prize was established to recognize the contribution of Samuel Eckler to the actuarial profession and is provided by Eckler Partners. The medal, which is cast in gold, is awarded each year to the outstanding graduating student in Honours Actuarial Science.

"In addition to his outstanding performance in actuarial science, George demonstrated great potential in statistics, his performance in my upper year biostatistics course was phenomenal!"

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is proud to announce the winners of the 2019 Teaching Award goes to Mirabelle Huynh and Wayne Oldford!

"Thank you for your commitment to and excellence in teaching"

The Master’s of Actuarial Science program (MActSc) celebrated its 10 year anniversary with a banquet dinner on Friday May 31, 2019, welcoming back MActSc alumni, faculty, and special guests. 

At the dinner, the faculty's newest scholarship, the Mary R. Hardy Graduate Award in Actuarial Science was announced. This endowed award was created in recognition of Mary Hardy’s immense contributions to the program and the actuarial profession. This award will be given annually to an incoming MActSc student who demonstrates both academic excellence and a strong commitment to serving the public good through volunteering and community service.

It’s not too late to donate!  Please join us in honouring Mary Hardy by supporting this award. Contributions of any size can be made on the scholarship website.

In his second year of undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, Michael Wallace realized that statistics are everywhere when he discovered SIGNIFICANCE magazine. He’s since written a number of articles for the magazine as he believes in helping everyone understand statistics and the importance of the subject in our lives.

He began his post-secondary education thinking that he wanted to study pure mathematics, but his attention turned to statistics because he saw the practical applications. While much of his work is theoretical in the field of biostatistics, working with a lot of equations, Wallace is motivated by real-world questions that we are looking to answer.

While completing his PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Wallace put his theoretical education to work with eye doctors at the University of London. Researchers there were completing a study with patients living with amblyopia, a condition where one eye experiences worse vision than the other. Common treatment includes the use of an eye patch over the good eye to retrain the bad eye through use. In this particular study, the eye patch gathered data.

This practical work taught Wallace about the importance of communication. This included learning how to ask the right questions (even if you think one may sound foolish), being prepared to admit that you don’t know what someone means, and being tactful. Helping the physicians – who are not statisticians – quickly understand complex ideas, such as measurement error, was very important. For example, although an eye doctor assesses your eyesight using an eye chart, measurement error may occur if a patient, unsure of a letter, manages to guess it correctly rather than acknowledge that they cannot see it clearly.

Dr. Ping Yan's latest work explores systematic treatment of the mathematical underpinnings of work in the theory of outbreak dynamics and their control, covering balanced perspectives between theory and practice including new material on contemporary topics in the field of infectious disease modelling. 

His work entitled "Quantitavtive Methods for Investigating Infectious Disease Outbreaks" has been published by the highly respected Springer Publishing Company. 

Dr. Ping Yan is an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, at the University of Waterloo. His work focuses on applying statistical and mathematical models in communicable diseases transmission, prevention and control, with a wide range of topics from estimation of HIV/AIDS and viral hepatitis disease burden to informing policy regarding pandemic influenza preparedness, vaccination and emergency response.

50 undergraduate students took part analyzing and applying data in the 48 hour on campus 2019 ASA DataFest competition earlier this month. Globally, over 2,000 students partake in this competition at several of the most prestigious colleges and universities including the University of Waterloo.

On April 12-15, 2019, the Risk Management, Economic Sustainability, and Actuarial Science Development in Indonesia (READI) Project, funded by Global Affairs Canada, conducted a short course on “Financial Engineering I” in Jakarta, Indonesia. The training was the 11 of the series of short course held in collaboration with the University of Waterloo in which the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science faculty members have led the teaching on all short courses. Prof. Ken Seng Tan, PhD, ASA, CERA, and Sunlife Fellowship in International Actuarial Science, was the instructor of the four days intensive training program. READI also invited Steven Chen, FSA, FCIA, CFA, MAA, an alumni of the University of Waterloo, as the guest speaker to provide a practitioners’ perspective on Financial Engineering.

Read the full article and learn more about the READI project on their website.

The University Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Global Research Rankings of Actuarial Science and Risk Management and Insurance has ranked the University of Waterloo the number one non-business, degree-granting school worldwide. Waterloo was ranked first in both the number of papers in the leading risk and insurance journal, as well as in the top four leading actuarial journals.

“I am extremely proud of the results of the UNL rankings,” said Stefan Steiner, Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. “Ranking first worldwide in the non-business school list is testament to the strong research happening at the University of Waterloo.”