CASS Presenters/Panelists
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Ian Duncan
Mr. Duncan is Adjunct Professor of Actuarial Statistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and president of Santa Barbara Actuaries Inc., a provider of healthcare predictive modeling services. From 2010 to 2014 he served as Vice President, Clinical Outcomes, Analytics and Reporting at the Walgreens Company. He founded Solucia Consulting (now SCIO Health Analytics), a provider of analytical and consulting services to the healthcare financing industry in 1998. Mr. Duncan holds a graduate degree in economics from Balliol College, Oxford and is a post-graduate research student at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries, the Institute of Actuaries, the Conference of Consulting Actuaries and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He is active in public policy and healthcare reform, and served on the board of directors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Health Insurance Connector Authority from 2007-2014. He was also a member of the board of the Society of Actuaries (2012-2015). Since 2011 he has been a Professor in the Department of Statistics & Applied Probability at UCSB, where he teaches courses in financial mathematics and life contingencies and a graduate seminar in actuarial research. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers, and several books and book chapters. His last book, a second edition of "Managing and Evaluating Healthcare Intervention Programs" (Actex Publications) was published in January 2014.
Janet Duncan
Janet Duncan is an actuarial lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she teaches an introduction to Property Casualty Insurance and a graduate research seminar in Actuarial Science. She has over 25 years of property/casualty financial analysis experience, including commercial and personal lines reserving and pricing, financial and capital modeling, planning, and management reporting. Janet's work experience includes six years as CNA's senior vice president and signing actuary, responsible for $17 billion of property/casualty reserves, including standard commercial lines, specialty lines, and discontinued operations. Prior to CNA, Janet worked at XL Capital, serving in roles of increasing responsibility including executive vice president and chief finance officer of XL Insurance Europe and Asia. She also worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (consulting and audit support), and served in various actuarial roles with Aetna Life & Casualty where she began her insurance career. Janet has a bachelor’s degree in Math/Actuarial Science from the University of Connecticut. She has served on several actuarial committees including the CAS Committee on Professionalism Education, the CAS Committee on Reserves, the AAA IFRS Task Force, the AAA Opinion Seminar Committee, and the SOA Strategic Planning Task Force.
Sally Ezra
Sally Ezra has spent over two decades recruiting actuaries, developing strong professional relationships and a vast network of clients who value her commitment, resourcefulness, her personal attention, and her high level of professional ethics. Sally knows and serves the domestic, offshore, and international markets. She works with all levels of actuaries, from students to Fellows and has placed senior-level actuaries, Chief Actuaries and consulting firm practice leaders. She genuinely enjoys guiding actuaries through their careers. Sally is ingrained within the Actuarial profession – she attends a wide variety of professional SOA and CAS functions each year, publishes in various Actuarial publications, and performs volunteer services for the Casualty Actuarial Society, the Society of Actuaries, and the American Academy of Actuaries.
Sally Ezra and Claude Penland founded Ezra Penland with the goal of serving the Actuarial and related modeling fields with the highest level of professionalism and with individual and dedicated attention. Ezra Penland works on all levels of Actuarial positions, from the analyst and actuarial assistant levels, up through Associateship, Fellowship, Chief Actuaries, consulting partners and executive management. Ezra Penland has deep experience within the related predictive modeling and catastrophe risk modeling fields, as well, and the firm is excited to be at the forefront of the insurance analytics field. These roles are in Property & Casualty, Life, Health, Pensions and Non-Traditional disciplines. Clients include insurers, reinsurers, brokers, consulting firms and other employers of actuaries and modelers.
Andrew Freedman
Andrew Freedman is a fourth year at UC Santa Barbara, and will be moving to graduate status in the Fall as part of the Combined M.S./B.S. Actuarial Science Program. He has been elected to be the Actuarial Exam Coordinator for the UC Santa Barbara Actuarial Association for the 2019-2020 School year. He has worked as a summer actuarial intern with Nationwide Pet Insurance and will be working as an actuarial intern this summer with The Standard.
Lee Gibson Ph.D.
Lee is the Director of Preliminary Exams at The Infinite Actuary and has also been an instructor since 2012. Lee's early interest in math lead to a Ph.D. from Cornell University, after he completed a Bachelor's at the University of Kentucky and a Master's from the University of Louisville. He is a fourth generation Kentucky educator with a deep enjoyment for helping people to learn. Lee has taught many undergraduate math courses at Cornell, the University of Louisville, and at Indiana University Southeast. Lee was frequently named as a faculty mentor or a faculty favorite while teaching college courses, and was the first ever recipient of the Cornell Math department Graduate Student Teaching award.
Session Description: Actuarial exams are hard. It's critical to have a clear plan of attack. At The Infinite Actuary, we've helped over 20,000 actuarial students prepare for their exams. In this session, we'll share some of our top tips on how to study for and take preliminary exams. There will also be plenty of time to ask us questions about the exam process.
Lauren Hettler: Director of Marketing for ACTEX Learning
Lauren serves as the Director of Marketing for ACTEX Learning. She has more than 13 years’ experience in the industrial, medical, financial and education sectors helping to establish and maintain brands.
Lauren is responsible for evaluating industry trends and guiding ACTEX through market analysis and strategic planning through campaign delivery and measurement. She crafts strategies to develop ACTEX’s corporate, academic and student sectors. These strategies included all facets of the creative and business processes, from budgeting, media planning, social media integration, website redesign, web content, video production and analytics.
Lauren holds a graduate degree in Advertising from Boston University.
Ryan Ho
Ryan is an Actuarial Assistant at Farmers Insurance, working in Personal Lines Auto Reserving under Corporate Actuarial (Reserving) department. He is responsible for producing and communicating periodic loss results, performing quarterly loss reserve analysis, and improving current reserving processes. Prior to joining Farmers full-time, Ryan interned at Farmers Insurance (Capital Modeling, Corporate Actuarial department), as well as Prudential plc (life insurance pricing) in Taipei, Taiwan and United Overseas Bank (corporate banking) in Singapore. Ryan graduated from UC Santa Barbara in Spring 2018 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Accounting.
Permoon Hussaini: President , UCSB Actuarial Association
Permoon is a fourth-year Actuarial Science major graduating in June 2019. As president of the association, she organizes and hosts the clubs’ professional, networking, social, and academic events in collaboration with the PSTAT department. In the summer of 2018, Permoon worked as an actuarial intern in the Health & Benefits department at Mercer, a leading global HR consulting firm, and will be joining Mercer as an actuarial analyst this summer.
Stephanie Lee
Stephanie Lee is an Actuarial Science Master's student at UCSB. She received first place for presenting research at the 2018 Actuarial Research Conference in London, Ontario and placed second in the poster competition. She is a recipient of the 2016 Wawanesa Insurance Scholarship and a three-time recipient of the Actuarial Diversity Scholarship from the Actuarial Foundation. Stephanie has worked actuarial internships at Aon Hewitt, Newport Beach in Health & Benefits and at Willis Towers Watson, San Francisco in Retirement. She has served as past President and past Journalist of the UCSB Actuarial Association. Stephanie currently works as Head TA of UCSB’s Probability and Statistics course and will graduate Spring 2019.
Andrew Mackenzie: ASA, CERA, MAAA, Actuarial Consultant, Santa Barbara Actuaries and Founder, ConsiliumChoice LLC
Andrew is a health actuary specializing in predictive modeling, risk assessment, and outcomes evaluation. He is currently a partner with Ian Duncan at Santa Barbara Actuaries and the President of ConsiliumChoice LCC, a small benefit election decision support company. As a Consultant at SBA, Andrew is largely involved in day-to-day client management, program operations, and strategy and development. He serves a wide variety of client types including payers, vendors, researchers, and providers in the health care industry helping them to understand, quantify, monitor, and mitigate risk. Before joining SBA, Andrew was a Chairman’s Fellow and Actuarial Associate at Towers Watson. As a Chairman’s Fellow, he conducted research into employee choice as it relates to benefits and built numerous models to predict choice and enhance plan design. Andrew is an Associate in the Society of Actuaries, a Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst, and holds degrees in Statistics and Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Daniel Mena
Daniel Mena is a Fellow of the CAS working in Business Insurance Group at Farmers Insurance. He primarily focuses on pricing the commercial multi-peril product, combining both traditional actuarial techniques with predictive modeling. Previous to Farmers Insurance, he was in San Francisco, working in personal auto at esurance and pension benefits at Fidelity. Daniel was a panelist at the CAS fall meeting speaking on diversity in the actuarial profession. He was a student commencement speaker at Santa Barbara in 2013. He enjoys running and a good escape room.
Claudine Modlin
Claudine Modlin is an actuary and insurance executive with more than 25 years’ experience in the industry. She is currently the Head of Personal Lines Product for the Western Zone at Farmers Insurance Group. In this role, she is responsible for executing the personal lines product strategy in 10 Western states, resulting in sustainable profitable growth. Prior to this role, she supported Farmers senior executive team to re-fresh the enterprise strategy to reflect new learnings from customer research and market assessments.
Prior to joining Farmers in 2018, Claudine spent 17 years with Willis Towers Watson, where she led a team focused on helping North American P&C insurers advance their pricing, product management, underwriting and claims analytics capabilities. Claudine has extensive actuarial experience, specifically in the fields of insurance pricing and predictive analytics. Earlier in her career Claudine was employed in actuarial positions at Allstate and AIG.
Claudine holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Bradley University. She is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society (FCAS) and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA). She is currently serving a three-year elected term on the CAS Board of Directors.
Claudine and her husband Patrick, a retired US Navy officer turned entrepreneur, have three daughters ages 10, 12, and 14. She enjoys traveling, shopping, watching movies and doing various acrobatic type activities (springboard diving, trapeze, trampoline) with her daughters.
Shannon Nicponski
Shannon Nicponski graduated with honors from UC Santa Barbara in January 2018 with both her Bachelors and Masters in Actuarial Science. While at university, she conducted research for CSAC-EIA on their workers compensation reserving model – specifically the mortality curve used -- and presented her team’s findings at the 2017 Actuarial Research Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. She interned with Cottage Hospital as a research statistician. Additionally, Shannon worked for UCSB’s statistics department as a grader and then as a teaching assistant for graduate research. Since graduation, Shannon has been employed as an Actuarial Analyst at Centene Corporation in Woodland Hills, California. She has worked on submissions associated with the Affordable Care Act and is currently working on risk adjustment.
Hal Pedersen
Hal W. Pedersen is Managing Director, Risk Solutions with Conning. Dr. Pedersen is one of the principal architects of GEMS, Conning’s economic and capital market scenario generator. He is the senior leader in the Quantitative Finance team where he directs the application of Conning’s ESG technology to risk management, business analytics, and innovative client focused solutions. He is an Associate of the Society of Actuaries and has more than 20 years academic and industry experience in the application of financial economics to insurance. He was L.A.H. Warren professor of actuarial science at the University of Manitoba from 2003 through 2011 and served on the actuarial faculty at Georgia State University from 1996 through 2001. He is Vice-Chair of the Society of Actuaries Investment Section council.
Julia Perrine
Julia brings over 30 years of experience in the insurance industry to her role with the Actuarial/Pricing group. Prior to joining Nationwide in 1994, she was an Actuarial Consultant with Milliman in both Seattle, Washington and Pasadena, California. Julia joined Nationwide as an Actuarial Director and was promoted to Associate Vice President in 2006. She has led the Nationwide E&S/Specialty team as Board Chair of the annual United Way campaign and is currently a member of the Community Leadership Council of Vitalent (formerly known as United Blood Services). Julia has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from the University of California at San Diego. She also holds Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society (FCAS) and Associate of Surplus Lines Insurance (ASLI) designations.
Andrew Peterson
Andrew Peterson is the Senior Director, International at the Society of Actuaries (SOA) working to implement the SOA’s mission of advancing actuaries as leaders in measuring and managing risk on a global basis. In that capacity he oversees the SOA’s activities outside of North America in advancing the actuarial profession through education and research. Andy works with the Board to establish the SOA’s international strategy and oversees the work of members and staff around the world in implementing that strategy. Prior to taking on this role in mid-2018, Andy served as the Senior Staff Fellow for Retirement where he worked with SOA members to develop and support better retirement systems. Andy received a BS degree in mathematics from Taylor University in 1992. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, an Enrolled Actuary, a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries, and a Fellow of the Conference of Consulting Actuaries. He is also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.
Martina Rosen: Community Development Director, UCSB Actuarial Association
Martina is a graduating senior in the Actuarial Science program at UC Santa Barbara. As community director, Martina oversees the Actuarial Association's mentorship program and leads educational events for club members. In the summer of 2018 Martina held an internship in the Credit Risk department at Montecito Bank & Trust, a Bauer Financial 5-star rated community bank in the Santa Barbara area. Following graduation, Martina will join the retirement actuarial team at Aon in Irvine, California.
Jonathan Trinh - Research Assistant at the UCSB Economic Forecast Project
Jonathan Trinh is a fourth-year actuarial science and economics student at UC Santa Barbara. In addition to being an economics research assistant and economics tutor on campus, he spent last summer as an actuarial intern at Farmers Insurance doing data analytics & automation work in their Commercial Insurance Reserving unit. After graduation, Jonathan will be working a summer internship at Deloitte, followed by a move to Analysis Group in downtown Los Angeles to work in economic litigation consulting full-time.