News

AF Group Partners with Michigan State University to Offer Master’s Certificate in Quantitative Risk Analytics

November 25, 2019

AF Group and Michigan State University (MSU) Department of Statistics and Probability are partnering to offer a Master’s-level certificate in Quantitative Risk Analytics exclusively to AF Group employees.

The partnership was formed through the collaborative efforts of Jacob Geyer, vice president of AF Specialty and Business Analytics & Underwriting Operations at Accident Fund Insurance Company of America and Dr. Albert Cohen, director of Program Development for the Department of Statistics and Probability at MSU.

“The insurance industry is extremely important to the economy of the Lansing region and we are honored to partner with MSU on this initiative,” said Geyer. “The 15 AF Group employees enrolled in the first year of the program are sharpening their linear algebra and statistics skills, enabling them to analyze techniques and algorithms in machine learning. The class participants will be able to work with complex company data using the analytics and quantitative tools learned throughout the coursework. We are off to a great start and we’re excited to see the program grow in the years ahead.”

“On a macro-level, we see this program expanding into additional areas of insurance, data science and their overlap,” said Dr. Cohen. “The interdisciplinary approach to learning data science is one that I continue to champion and it is a pleasure to see it working so well in our partnership with AF Group.”

“The success of this program is important to us in the Actuarial Science/QRA program at MSU,” said Frederi Viens, director of MSU’s Actuarial Science Program. “It represents a pioneering effort to bring graduate-level data science instruction directly to the heart of a major insurance company.”

The program, which began this fall, is conducted at AF Group’s Lansing headquarters and online. It includes four seven- to eight-week courses. The first full-year session concludes in May 2020.