Vicki Zhang is an Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of Statistical Science at the University of Toronto. She joined the department as a faculty member in 2013, after eight years working as an actuary, consultant, and statistician in the insurance sector, first in the United States then in Canada. She was a niche leader at Milliman’s predictive modeling team working on risk adjuster and life-style based analytics for health insurance pricing and underwriting. She was heavily involved in various healthcare pricing and experience studies including US federal government’s multi-billion-dollar TRICARE, US behavioural healthcare experience analysis, and medical underwriting guideline development. She had a one-year stint as a mergers and acquisition actuary at PricewaterhouseCoopers, working on pension and employee benefits issues in M&A process. In Canada, she worked as an actuarial software developer and later a client specialist at Moody’s Analytics (formerly GGY). She gave numerous training sessions to users of the actuarial software AXIS, covering various lines of insurance business including life, disability, long-term care, critical illness, etc. Her training clients were located in Canada, US, Western Europe, and Asia. She also served as a consultant for United Nation’s microinsurance program in China and Mongolia in 2009.

Since joining UofT in 2013, Vicki Zhang has been a passionate course designer/redesigner and pedagogical researcher. She created the capstone course Insurance Products, Markets and Regulation with AXIS, which explores the complex history of the life insurance product design and regulation in US and Canada, while providing students with hands-on experience with the widely-used industry software AXIS. She has introduced various case studies to her second-year courses that provide students with real-world context and applications to the course content. She developed a pedagogical approach of "narrative mathematics" to improve concept linkage and active-learning among students in large-classroom courses. She was nominated for a prestigious UofT (Tri-campus) Early Career Teaching Award in 2019.

She is currently a journal reviewer for The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CJSoTL), and a frequent paper reviewer for International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) and Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) annual conferences. She is a frequent speaker at various national and regional conferences. She also serves as the Accreditation Actuary for Canadian Institute of Actuaries’ University Accreditation Program.

Vicki Zhang holds a Master's in Statistics and Applied Probabilities (with completion of all PhD qualification exams), a B.Eng in Electrical Engineering, and a Harvard Higher Education Teaching Certificate. She is a Fellow of Society of Actuaries (FSA), an Associate of Canadian Institute of Actuaries (ACIA), and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA).

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