Ph.D. Candidates

Ph.D. Candidates

Panyi Dong

Year: 2022

Panyi Dong is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics with concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before he joined the doctoral program, he obtained a master degree in Actuarial Science and Risk Management at UIUC. He has participated in IRisk Lab Automated Machine Learning project during Fall 2021 and has been supervising IRisk projects since then. His research focuses on innovations of Machine Learning and Data Science in Insurance.

Changyue Hu

Year: 2021

Changyue Hu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics. Prior to joining the doctoral program, she obtained her Master’s degree in Actuarial Science at the University of Illinois and her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at Nankai University. Her research interests lie in machine learning applications in actuarial science, especially with tree-based models. She has been a graduate supervisor of several InsurTech-related research projects in IRisk Lab since Spring 2021.

Seongyoon Kim

Year: 2022

Seongyoon Kim is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics. His research interests are quantitative finance, probability theory, and decentralized finance. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he obtained his Master’s degree in Mathematics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is currently researching on the decentralized insurance under the supervision of Professor Feng.

Yuxuan Li

Year: 2019

Yuxuan Li is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, he obtained a Master’s degree in Financial Engineering from Cornell University. His research focuses on machine learning, in particular reinforcement learning, applied to the actuarial and financial context. He has been supervising the machine-learning-related projects in the IRisk Lab since Spring 2021.

Kenneth (Tsz Hin) Ng

Year: 2020

Kenneth (Tsz Hin) Ng is a PhD candidate at the department of Mathematics, concentrating on actuarial science and risk management. Prior to joining UIUC, he obtained a Master of Philosophy in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science in Actuarial Science with First Class Honours, both at the University of Hong Kong. Broadly speaking, his research interests lie on stochastic control and optimal stopping, with applications in financial mathematics and actuarial science. Specifically, he is focusing on pension management using forward preferences and applications of mean field games.  He has also served as a reviewer for the Scandinavian Actuarial Journal.

Zhonghe Wan

Year: 2022

Zhonghe Wan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics with concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before she joined the doctoral program, she obtained a master degree in Statistics at UIUC. She participated in the Research Reading Group of the Department of Mathematics as well as worked as a head teaching assistant for many courses in the Gies College of Business. She served as a graduate research assistant throughout 2021, and her research focused on random network modeling.

Yasintorn Wongwoottisaroch

Year: 2022

Yasintorn Wongwoottisaroch is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics with concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before joining the doctoral program, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Accounting (Major Integrative Business Accounting) at Thammasat University in Thailand and a Master’s degree in Insurance at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. His first job was an accounting analyst at ExxonMobil (Thailand) and the most recent one was an adjunct instructor at Chulalongkorn University, teaching General Principles of Insurance. His research focuses on Enterprise Risk Management, Insurance Rules and Regulations, Quantitative Finance. In his leisure time, he likes to listen to music, watch comedies, and listen to the news or ghost stories from Thai channels.

Yulong Wu

Year: 2020

Yulong Wu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he obtained his Master’s degree in Mathematics at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with a concentration in Actuarial Science and his Bachelor’s degree in Economics at the Central University of Finance and Economics with a concentration in Actuarial Science. His current research interests lie in Decentralised Finance, especially the Decentralised Insurance. He is looking to carry the research idea of decentralisation to the asset valuation field after. He has been a graduate supervisor of several financial trading algorithm and decentralised insurance projects in IRisk Lab since Spring 2021.

Yong Xie

Year: 2019

Yong Xie is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics with Concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics at University of Illinois. He is interested in the arising challenges and opportunities of risk analytics and risk management in the era of big data and artificial intelligence. Most recently, he has been working on a series of research projects on adversarial risk in the financial market. Besides, he also works with Dr. Daniel Linders on herd behavior and its impact in stock market.  He is an active participant in IRisk Lab: he supervised project Measuring Intra-day Systemic Risk in High-frequency OrderBooks in Spring 2020 and project Using Text Mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Extract Actuarial-Related Information from Online Customer Reviews for Businesses in Fall 2020.

Ph.D. Alumni

Linfeng Zhang

First Destination: Ohio State University

Linfeng Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His concentration is in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics. Before he joined the doctoral program, he worked at the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) as a research assistant on various topics on cyber risks and cyber insurance. With his work and research experience in this field, he has been supervising IRisk Lab projects related to cyber since Fall 2019. Additionally, he has been working with Professor Alfred Chong and Professor Runhuan Feng on several cutting-edge topics including pandemic risks and lifecycle planning and has been supervising student projects on those topics in the IRisk Lab.

Samal Abdikerimova

First Destination: EEGO

2016-2022

Longhao Jin

First destination: Facebook

2017-2022

Chongda Liu

First destination: Carstleton Communities International

2016-2021

Bingji Yi

First destination: Sunrise Futures

2012-2017