Board Member Candidate Questionnaire

Runhuan Feng, FSA, CERA

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: Share a personal experience, trait, or characteristic that will help the membership to better understand you and your candidacy.

I am an academic actuary with entrepreneurial spirit. My work is guided by deep curiosity and a commitment to developing solutions with lasting impact - not just identifying problems, but building the teams and systems needed to address them.

During my tenure as Director of the University of Illinois actuarial program, I confronted systemic challenges including chronic funding shortages. Through strategic curriculum redesign, I successfully integrated data science while securing crucial institutional support. A highlight was establishing the Predictive Analytics program, achieving a 4x faculty expansion (very difficult in academic setting), 3x growth in graduate enrollment, and self- sustaining revenue streams.

At Tsinghua University, I'm working to redefine actuarial science's academic position. As the founding Editor-in- Chief of Risk Sciences, I created the first scholarly platform that aims to position actuarial science at the intersection of and on a par with other related disciplines. Unlike traditional actuarial journals, Risk Sciences actively fosters cross-disciplinary dialogue while demonstrating actuarial science's central relevance to contemporary risk challenges.

PROJECT LEADERSHIP / CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Describe a significant project that you led in the workplace or in your volunteer activities. Describe how you made decisions and addressed changes that were proposed, whether changes were made, or were not made, after considering all options. How did you achieve buy-in in the final outcome, and what were the biggest challenges you had to overcome?

When I took over the actuarial program, I inherited a perfect storm of challenges: severe resource constraints, declining enrollment, and institutional skepticism about the program's long-term viability. Rather than accepting decline, I recognized this crisis as an opportunity for fundamental transformation. My strategy centered on demonstrating growth potential through tangible, evidence-based results.

With no internal funding available, I explored alternative financing by cultivating external partnerships and pursuing special initiative grants. I adopted a phased implementation strategy, first launching small certificate programs as proof-of-concept demonstrations. These programs quickly attracted student demand, providing the concrete evidence needed to convince university leadership of our growth potential. This success paved the way for securing the necessary resources to launch a comprehensive degree program expansion.

The scaling phase presented new operational challenges—particularly how to maintain quality while working with limited personnel. I developed an innovative cross-departmental partnership model featuring flexible revenue-sharing agreements that incentivized collaboration with other university units. This cooperative framework enabled our lean team to achieve development milestones that typically require years of effort and significantly larger staff.

The ultimate outcomes extended beyond immediate program survival. We established sustainable funding models, forged valuable interdisciplinary connections, and fundamentally changed how the institution viewed actuarial science - from a legacy program to an emerging growth area. This transformation stands as a testament to the power of entrepreneurship when facing institutional challenges.

ACTUARY OF THE FUTURE: What does the future of the actuarial profession look like to you? What strategies should the SOA implement to grow the actuarial profession, especially in light of more competition for analytical skills and data science job opportunities?

The actuarial profession stands at a critical juncture where embracing AI technologies will determine our future relevance. I would champion the integration of generative AI training alongside the existing actuarial curriculum. The current "wait-and-see" approach to AI development leaves our profession vulnerable to disruption. We must proactively revamp both our educational framework and professional training to incorporate AI tools at every level.

My teaching experience at Tsinghua demonstrates the transformative potential of this approach. When I inherited a decades-old actuarial course with dwindling enrollment, I recognized the fundamental problem: outdated content focused on tedious calculations rather than business insights. I have abandoned financial calculators and instead asked students to only use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Students now solve complex, real-world financial scenarios in half an hour, which would take at least a day with calculators. In fact, it would only take minutes for GAI to do calculations. Students spent the rest of the time examining AI outputs. This innovation condensed material traditionally taught over three semesters into one, with students gaining deeper practical understanding as they focus on analysis rather than manual computation.

The industry faces similar challenges. While insurers increasingly adopt AI across operations, actuarial departments remain surprisingly slow-paced, clinging to traditional Excel-like workflows and experience-driven methodologies. Through my role as an independent board member for a mid-sized Chinese insurer, I have observed this technological lag firsthand. Our profession must lead rather than follow in developing AI technology.

INNOVATION / ADAPTION: How has your experience prepared you to lead through challenges such as AI, technological disruption, climate change and generational shifts? How would you guide a knowledge-based workforce, including actuaries, in addressing these emerging issues?

As an academic at the forefront of technological transformation, I have a unique vantage point on our profession's evolution. In universities, we dedicate the majority of our efforts to understanding society's most pressing challenges. This reality inspired me to create Risk Sciences, a comprehensive interdisciplinary platform that includes an open-access journal, multimedia channels, and traditional media special columns. Through this initiative, I have worked to break down disciplinary barriers to connect academic actuaries with engineers, environmental scientists in academic exchanges about technologies like AI and blockchain, as well as global challenges including climate change and demographic transitions.

Our profession now stands at a critical crossroads requiring bold, comprehensive action. The SOA could reimagine itself as a global thought leader by:

First, creating platforms for knowledge exchange that bring together similar professionals such as financial planners, and accountants on how they adapt to emerging technologies and what we actuaries can learn from their practices.

Second, empowering local chapters to lead grassroots development where local members can share insights on technological adoption. We need to establish regular forums for exchanging best practices.

Most urgently, we must revolutionize our educational pipeline. Rather than incrementally adapting existing fellowship tracks, we should create an entirely new associate-fellowship direct-track in AI designed specifically to attract top-tier computer science talent from their very first actuarial course. This program should produce professionals with deep technical mastery who can fundamentally reimagine how AI transforms actuarial work rather than simply applying existing tools.