Prof Conrad Beyers has been appointed the Head of the Department of Actuarial Science from 1 August 2022.

“The Department of Actuarial Science will strive to maintain and strengthen its reputation as a leading destination for students who plan to enter the workforce as risk managers and actuaries. Over the past ten years, interdisciplinary collaboration, both locally and internationally, proved to greatly assist in accelerating actuarial research growth and development. This is essential to a successful research vision,” Prof Beyers explained his vision for the Department.”

He elaborated, “It is envisioned that the Department could assist in attracting a broader range of postgraduate quantitative risk research students to UP through inter-departmental and inter-faculty collaboration. Research and teaching innovation are embedded within a broad and rapidly changing environment, where transformation processes and community engagement are essential to the Department’s continued relevance and ability to make a meaningful contribution,” Prof Beyers concluded.

He started his teaching and academic career in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics in 2001. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and is a qualified actuary with the Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary (CERA) designation. In 2010, he moved to the Department of Actuarial Science. As a teaching-intensive department, there was no research contingent at that stage, and he started to work towards developing research capacity in the Department. This culminated in establishing the Absa Chair in Actuarial Science in 2013, facilitating significant growth in the Department’s research activities, including postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellowships and research output.

Prof Beyers is a C2-rated researcher. Actuarial Science is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining a range of practical and theoretical areas relevant to risk and uncertainty in the financial and business world. An interdisciplinary research network with researchers from areas including mathematics, statistics, machine learning, economics, computer science and banking law has developed, especially since the establishment of the Absa Chair in Actuarial Science. He was appointed as Editor of the South African Actuarial Journal in 2018.

His research focuses on risks pertaining to the banking and related industries. Risk contagion in financial systems (systemic risk) forms the core of research questions. However, related areas such as stress testing, early warning systems, credit risk and fraud modelling are increasingly prominent. With collaborators, advanced methodologies such as machine learning and network theory applications were incorporated into these financial fields, where more conventional approaches dominated.

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Prof Conrad Beyers