MRM Faculty

The faculty that participate in the MRM program range from world class senior faculty with years of experience and distinguished academic careers to junior faculty trained in the latest techniques used in quantitative risk management. All faculty in the MRM program are actively engaged in both basic academic research as well as more applied research and several have direct work or consulting experience in the industry.

RICHARD D. PHILLIPS, Bruce A. Palmer Professor of Risk Management and Insurance and MRM Program Faculty Adviser
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M.A., University of Pennsylvania
B.S. University of Minnesota
Specializations: Financial and Insurance Economics, Risk Management

Professor Phillips is the faculty adviser for the MRM program and also the Chair of the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University. Dr. Phillips’ current research interests are studying the impact of risk on corporate decision making, the functioning of insurance markets, and the role of rating agencies in the economy. He is a contributing author on several books and he has published in academic and policy journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Journal of Financial Services Research, the Journal of Law and Economics, among others.

SHAUN WANG, Robert W. Batten Chair of Actuarial Science
Ph.D. (Statistics), University of Waterloo
B.S. (Mathematics), Beijing University
Specializations: Risk Measurement, Quantification, and Pricing; Enterprise Risk Management; Correlation Modeling

Professor Wang is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, and a Member of American Academy of Actuaries. Dr. Wang also serves as the Executive Director and Director of Research for the newly formed Enterprise Risk Management Institute International (ERM-II). Dr. Wang has published extensively on the topics of risk measurement, correlation modeling, and the pricing of risk, in such leading journals. He currently serves as Editor of the ASTIN Bulletin and is also Executive Director of the ERM Institute International, Ltd. Prior to joining the Georgia State faculty, he was assistant vice president and group research director at SCOR—a global reinsurance company. While at SCOR, Dr. Wang developed a universal pricing formula—now commonly known as the Wang transform—for insurance risks, credit risks, and weather derivatives. He extended the Wang transform to analyze catastrophe bond transactions, corporate bond yield spreads, and applied the new 2-factor model to the pricing of aggregate stop-loss reinsurance and catastrophe reinsurance.

YURIY KITSUL, Assistant Professor of Economics
Ph.D., Economics, University of North Carolina
M.A., Economics, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine
B.S., Physics, Odessa State University, Ukraine
Specializations: Time series econometrics, Financial economics

Professor Kitsul's primary areas of interest are time series econometrics and financial economics. His current research focuses on modeling of investors' preferences and interest rates and on the empirical estimation of such models. He is also interested in estimation of stochastic volatility models of stock prices. Kitsul teaches financial econometrics.

AJAY SUBRAMANIAN, Assistant Professor of Risk Management and Insurance
Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Cornell University
M.S. Mathematics, Cornell University
M.A. Physics, State University of New York at Stony Brook
B.Tech, Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay
Specializations: Applied Stochastic Control Techniques, Term Structure Modeling, Asset Pricing Theory, Corporate Finance, Financial Intermediation

Professor Subramanian worked as a quantitative research associate with the investment firm Susquehanna International Group in Bala Cynwyd, PA after completing his PhD. His current research interests lie in mathematical finance, theoretical asset pricing and corporate finance, and applied probability.

ADAM L. SPEIGHT, Assistant Professor of Risk Management and Insurance
Ph.D. Mathematical Finance, Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. Mathematics, University of Colorado at Denver
B.S. Mathematics, University of Colorado at Denver
Specializations: Risk Modeling & Quantitative Techniques, Financial Engineering, Asset Pricing, Dynamic General Equilibrium

Professor Speight specializes in the development of computational techniques appropriate for solving large, complex models in financial engineering, risk management, and asset pricing. His current research aims at understanding the interplay between insurance and financial markets, especially catastrophe risk, securitization, and mortgage insurance.

DANIEL BAUER, Assistant Professor of Risk Management and Insurance
Ph.D., Mathematics, Ulm University
M.S., Statistics, San Diego State University
Specializations: Financial methods in insurance, Mathematical finance, Risk Modeling

Professor Bauer specializes in the development of new mathematical models for the valuation and risk management of insurance products and insurance-linked securities. Other interests include the economics of annuitization and computational finance. He is among the first junior members of the German Society for Actuarial and Financial Mathematics and an immediate candidate of the German Society of Actuaries.