Ph.D. Candidates & Postdocs
Ph.D. Candidates
Panyi Dong
Ph.D. Student in Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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
Ph.D. Student in Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Yuxuan Li
Ph.D. student in Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Andres Antonio Medina Landeros
Ph.D. student in Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Andres is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics with a concentration in Actuarial Science and Risk Analytics, B.S. In Actuarial Science, he has passed 5 Society of Actuaries Exams and has earned all 3 SOA VEE Credits. He is a 2022-2023 State Farm Scholar, Certified Data Scientist in R and currently doing a certification in Python as a Machine Learning Scientist. He has experience researching and implementing models and quantitative investment strategies in equity portfolios & leading end-to-end Data Science projects. His research interests lie in the intersection of Probability Theory, Quantitative Finance, Risk Management and Actuarial Science.
Yulong Wu
Ph.D. student in Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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
Ph.D. Student in Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Linfeng Zhang
Ph.D. Student in Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Postdocs
Peixen Liu
Ph.D. student in Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Peixen Liu is a J. L. Doob research assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to employment, he received his Ph.D. degree in applied economics (finance) at School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University in 2022. His research mainly focuses on understanding the impacts of model uncertainty in a variety of economic contexts. Meanwhile he keeps a broad interest in multiple applicational research topics ranging from traditional problems in financial economics and asset pricing to newly emerging challenges faced by our community. At the current time he is looking at research opportunities in the changes that technology brings to finance and insurance industries.