Message from the Outgoing E&R Chair

By Liang (Jason) Hong

Expanding Horizons, November 2022

It has been a pleasure to serve the Education and Research (E&R) Section during the past year. As my term comes to an end, I am thrilled to see that Russell Hendel, Hal Pederson and Stefanos Orfanos have been elected to the new chair and vice-chair positions, and that Peng Shi will be the new liaison of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Actuarial Science Early Career Award. With equal excitement, I see Sang-Hoon Ahn, Min Ji, Fang Yang, and Lu Xiong were recently elected to the council. In the spring, Jane Lesch, our former section specialist, retired after many years of service. Jane has made immeasurable contributions to our section as well as to the SOA. We are fortunate to have an equally capable and wonderful specialist, Carla Eisenberg, with us now. In addition, Stuart Klugman will continue to help our section in many ways. I cannot be more confident that our council will continue to prosper.

We had our first in-person Actuarial Research Conference (ARC) on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in August 2022. The local organizing committee of UIUC put forth a tremendous amount of effort to ensure a successful conference. Like many of you, I heard numerous positive comments throughout the ARC. If you were there in August, I'm sure you were excited to see your old friends and meet some new ones. If you could not make it this year, I strongly urge you to attend the next one at Drake University.

With the strong support from SOA staff, as well as the council members, the selection of the SOA Early Career Award went well. I am grateful that SOA President-Elect John Robinson was willing to present the award to this year's winner, Professor Tim Boonen, at the ARC banquet. This award certainly brings good publicity to our E&R Section, the SOA and the actuarial research community.

While a year sounds like a long time, I feel there are so many things I could not even find time to bring to the attention of our council members. But I am proud of what my fellow council members and friends accomplished during this special year when the world transitioned from lockdown status back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normality. I thank them all for their strong commitment.

Finally, significant portions of SOA members are located outside the United States. I hope more academic actuaries in these locations—especially in Asia, Canada and Oceania—will join the E&R Section council in the future.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Liang (Jason) Hong, PhD, FSA, is the outgoing chair of the Education and Research Section council and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He can be reached at liang.hong@utdallas.edu.