Cass MSc student awarded SCOR prize

A Cass Business School MSc student has scooped the prestigious 2017 SCOR UK Actuarial Prize for the best academic paper in the field of actuarial science.

This year's prize was awarded to Luo Pengziwei for her MSc dissertation Credibility balanced Bias vs. Instability trade-off within Double Chain Ladder.

The SCOR Actuarial Prize, which is well recognised in the insurance industry, runs across six countries and is designed to promote actuarial science research and increase knowledge in the field.

Winning papers are selected for their innovative character, practical applicability, and the relevance of methods used. The judging panel is made up of insurance, reinsurance and financial professionals and academics.

Luo was invited to the SCOR Annual Chairman's Dinner in Trinity House, Tower Hill, London to receive her prize and grant of £3,000.

She said she was delighted to receive the prize.

“I was genuinely surprised and very honoured to have been awarded the SCOR Actuarial Prize as I knew how tough the competition was. I am very grateful for the support and guidance that I received from Professor Nielson and Cass. Winning this award means a great deal to me.  It has not only recognised my work but given me the opportunity to meet prominent figures in the field of actuarial science who are guiding me in my future career development.”

L-R: Chairman and CEO of SCOR SE Denis Kessler; Yanis Varoufakis; Luo Pengziwei; and Professor Christopher Daykin, Honorary Visiting Professor, Cass.

Luo’s supervisor, Dr Jens Perch Nielsen said Luo’s thesis was a particularly interesting piece of research delivered at a very high level for a master thesis student.

“Luo was an unusually enthusiastic and hardworking young woman when writing her master thesis. She managed to have a productive dialogue – not only with me – but also with some of the other major co-authors and inventors of the Double-Chain-Ladder framework.

Via an enormous effort she tested the computational content of almost all published papers on Double Chain Ladder and she went through all the computational details of the Double-Chain-Ladder R-package. Her personal contribution in her thesis is very interesting and will perhaps one day be published. It is worth pointing out that the validation principles inherent in Double Chain Ladder can be used to implement credibility weighting competing reserving methods.”

You can find out more about the MSc Actuarial Science programmes at Cass here.

Find out more about MSc programmes at Cass here.