Description: On October 4–5, 2025, actuarial educators and researchers gathered in New Orleans for the Actuarial Mathematics and Actuarial Education Special Session at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Fall Southeastern Sectional Meeting. The event brought together seventeen speakers from universities, professional societies, and industry to discuss the future of actuarial education, practical applications of actuarial methods, and advances in actuarial modeling. The session featured rich discussions on artificial intelligence in actuarial education, experiential learning through case studies, competency-based assessments, and industry-integrated research courses. Applications-focused talks addressed mortality shocks from COVID-19, disaster aid modeling, queuing systems, health and longevity metrics, healthcare reserving, flood risk in real estate, and value-based insurance contracts. The final segment highlighted advanced actuarial models, including optimal insurance with incentives, variable annuity hedging, extreme risk inference, AutoML for insurance, and privacy-preserving data collaboration. Overall, the session emphasized collaboration, innovation, and adaptability as essential for advancing actuarial science in an era of rapid technological and societal change.

Description: In the spring of 2019, Dr. Cai started to serve as the Actuarial Science Program coordinator at Salisbury University, a medium-sized public teaching school in Maryland. At that time, the program was small, with only two faculty members who focused on both statistics and actuarial science, with approximately 10 students. During the next five years, the program did make some achievements in curriculum development, student exam preparation, job placement, and recognition, but Dr. Cai continued to have a dream to make the program unique. Dr. Cai believed that the skill sets students learned, even from a small program, could enable them to compete with anyone on a global basis. In spring 2024, Dr. Cai advised a group of exceptional actuarial students to participate in the 2024 Society of Actuaries (SOA) Student Research Case Study Challenge (SRCSC), and the team won third place – —behind two teams from the University of New South Wales, Australia. This article is the story of the journey.