What is an actuary?

At its core, actuarial science uses mathematics, statistics and financial theory to manage risk and inform decision-making. While the work is rooted in numbers, it is ultimately about helping institutions understand what could happen in the future — and how to plan for it.

The profession is structured around four main practice areas: health, life, property and casualty, and pensions. Each track focuses on a different kind of risk and requires specialized knowledge of industries, regulations and financial systems.

Health actuaries, like Baird, work with hospitals, insurance companies and government programs to analyze medical costs, design insurance pricing and evaluate how healthcare services are funded and delivered.

“We’re trying to make sure that their prices are fair, and that they are financially stable,” she said.

Baird started at Milliman as an actuarial analyst, supporting a software product designed to predict individual health care costs using past claims data. She trained predictive models, validated them and answered client questions.

Over time, her role expanded. Baird discovered she excelled in consulting, working directly with clients to solve unique problems. She now leads research and development for the software product and holds a senior-level position on the consulting side. Her work ranges from pricing Medicare plans to helping hospitals understand payment models to evaluating how successful medical interventions are at improving patient outcomes.

“My days are never boring," she said. “Clients bring us hard problems and we get to design studies, build models and really dig into whether something is working.”

No two assignments look the same, she said, because no two clients are trying to solve identical problems. That variability is part of what keeps the work engaging: each project requires adapting models, interpreting data in context and explaining results to non-technical audiences.

While insurance can be a complex and sometimes frustrating system for consumers, Baird emphasizes the broader mission behind the work.

“It can be tricky, but it can also save lives,” she said. “We aren’t just there to help insurance companies make more money. We’re there to help them serve the people that need health care.”

In January 2026, Baird joined the Actuarial Standards Board, which sets standards that actuaries in the U.S. must follow in their work. It also oversees updates to those standards through volunteer expert task forces and public comment, helping ensure consistency and professionalism across the field.

“It's been a great experience because they’re all people who are really passionate and excited. We spend a lot of time in passionate discussions and debates, making sure we think through all the implications of the guidance that we’re creating. Am I setting the bar too high for actuaries? Or am I not setting it high enough?”

Baird’s take on how to become an actuary

Baird grew up in Central Point, Oregon, and was interested in pursuing a degree in education, but a high school calculus class shifted her trajectory.

“I really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of it,” she said. “It felt like the first time you moved beyond mechanics and got to how we use math to solve problems.”

That realization led her to pursue mathematics at Oregon State, where she eventually completed her undergraduate degree, master’s degree in mathematics and a dual Ph.D. in mathematics and statistics.

Her interest in actuarial science didn’t take hold until graduate school. After taking her first probability course, she began to see new possibilities, deciding to take her first actuarial exam while she was still in school.

Becoming an actuary requires a series of rigorous professional exams that unfold over several years. Candidates complete seven exams and a series of modules and other courses to reach Associate status, with several additional exams and modules needed to be fully credentialed as a Fellow. Most candidates study while working full-time, turning the exam process into a parallel track of education and career experience.

Always being open to learning benefited Baird when she started at Milliman. New terminology, processes and expectations felt overwhelming. Although she credits her graduate training for helping her develop critical skills like note-taking and technical writing, it took her time to adjust.

“For the first six to eight months, I felt completely out of my element,” she said.

Doubting yourself in a new role is a normal experience, Baird said, but those feelings won’t last forever. Over time, that uncertainty gave way to confidence and she took on leadership roles.

For students interested in actuarial careers, Baird recommends gaining early exposure to the field by taking exams and pursuing internships. Equally important are soft skills.

“We’re a very collaborative group,” she said. “Making sure that you can show that you have successfully worked as part of a team or led a team is helpful.”

Actuarial work goes beyond spreadsheets and equations; it’s about using math to guide decisions that affect people’s lives. From shaping how healthcare is delivered to ensuring organizations can meet their financial commitments, that work carries real consequences. For Baird, it’s a job that lets her use mathematical skills in ways that have real-world impact.

2026 Milne Lecture

Veridical Data Science for Healthcare in the Age of AI

Date: Monday, May 11, 2026
Time: 4 to 5 p.m. (a reception will precede the lecture from 3:30 to 4 p.m.)
Location: Johnson Hall 102

Bin Yu, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, will introduce veridical data science: Grounded in three fundamental principles — Predictability, Computability and Stability (PCS) — veridical data science makes the uncertainties surrounding human judgment more explicit and assessable, aggregating reality-checked algorithms for better results. The PCS framework unifies and extends best practices in statistics and machine learning and is illustrated through healthcare applications, including identifying genetic drivers of heart disease, reducing cost of prostate cancer detection, improving uncertainty quantification beyond standard conformal prediction, and proposing Green Shielding, a new user-centric framework for safeguarding users of AI.

Be sure to arrive early for a reception from 3:30 to 4 p.m. right outside Johnson 102!

About the speaker: Bin Yu

Professor Bin Yu leads the Yu Group at UC Berkeley, an interdisciplinary team in Statistics and EECS dedicated to advancing machine learning, artificial intelligence and veridical data science. Her group develops efficient and interpretable ML/AI methods and theory, ranging from iterative random forests (iRF) and tree-based FIGS to LoRA+ for fine-tuning deep learning and CD-T and SPEX for interpreting deep models. The Yu Group collaborates closely with domain experts in medical AI, genomics and neuroscience.

A member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has delivered major keynotes, including the 2019 Breiman Lecture at NeurIPS, 2023 IMS Wald Lectures and the COPSS DAAL Lecture (formerly Fisher Lecture). She and her team pioneered the PCS framework (predictability, computability, and stability) for veridical (truthful) data science (VDS), which has become an influential guide for transparent, trustworthy data science and AI.

“All these major systems in our body have open ears and open minds for the messages that the gut microbiome has to say,” Sharpton (Biochemistry & Biophysics ‘03) said.

Sharpton leads interdisciplinary research to pick apart the microbiome’s impact. His work lays the path for future human health innovations that embrace the relationship with our microscopic roommates. He also helped build the Oregon State University Microbiome Initiative (OMBI), a campus-wide effort that connects researchers studying microbial communities in fields ranging from human health to agriculture and ocean science.

How gut microbes shape health

A major theme across Sharpton’s research is that microbes don’t just correlate with health. They determine how organisms — like us — experience their chemical environment.

“The gut microbiome mediates how we experience our diet, how we experience the drugs we consume and the environmental pollutants that we’re exposed to,” he said.

That principle guides the lab’s experiments on the gut-brain axis, neurodegenerative disease, behavior and cognition.

To test causality at scale, he established a unique partnership between his team’s computational skills and the zebrafish research community at Oregon State, particularly the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory. Human microbiomes vary widely, and large, controlled clinical studies are expensive. Zebrafish enable high-replicate tests that isolate microbe-host-environment interactions. In collaboration with OSU colleagues, Sharpton’s group has shown that pollutants can restructure the gut microbiome and alter neurobehavioral development, and that removing the microbiome can flip a chemical’s effect.

“We studied a pollutant that drives a behavioral alteration and makes a fish hyperactive,” he said. “What happens when you take the microbiome away? All of a sudden, that pollutant makes the fish hypoactive.”

These studies reposition the microbiome as an active biochemical gatekeeper between environment and physiology. They also illuminate why two people with similar genetics and exposures can respond differently to the same diet or medication: their microbial communities and the metabolites they produce are not the same.

Sharpton’s computational work pushes the field beyond cataloging species. By integrating genomic information from gut samples and applying rigorous statistics, his lab seeks out functional signatures linked to health and disease. This shift from taxonomy to function has helped the field home in on mechanisms that are more likely to translate between species and into clinical contexts. Recently Sharpton’s team published a study titled “Modeling the zebrafish gut microbiome’s resistance and sensitivity to climate change and parasite infection” in Frontiers in Microbiomes (July 2025).

Equally important to what questions the team asks is how they answer them. The lab builds and releases open-source software and curated data resources so that others can reproduce analyses, train students and extend the findings.

“We publish everything we produce for free. It holds us accountable and helps others reproduce our results,” Sharpton said.

That openness accelerates discovery in a fast-moving field where methods evolve nearly as quickly as the microbes they study.

While zebrafish allow for fast, controlled tests, the lab’s standard of evidence requires asking whether those mechanisms translate to mammals and people. Sharpton’s group works across zebrafish, mouse and human systems (with some nonhuman primate studies) to assess findings.

“At the end of the day, we really want our research to matter to people,” he said. “We always try to swing the bat around and determine if what we’re seeing in these model systems is relevant in human systems as well.”

That translational arc is especially crucial in the lab’s gut-brain axis research. What began for Sharpton as skepticism has turned into sustained investigation. Across fish, mice, children and adults, his team and collaborators repeatedly see robust links between the microbiome and behavior or cognition. Those links raise questions for how we might treat cognitive and neurodegenerative disorders in the future.

“Do we have novel opportunities to prevent or treat these diseases that are frankly terrifying to many people?” Sharpton said. “Efforts to manage, manipulate or someday even engineer microbiomes may be a fundamental transformation in our ability to prevent, diagnose and treat chronic diseases.”

The future of microbiome science

With public interest in the microbiome surging, Sharpton is careful to separate promise from hype. “A lot of people think the microbiome is the key contributor to health, and it isn't. But it is an important component alongside other variables,” he said.

Methods are advancing, individual variation is large and proving cause and effect is challenging.

“It’s almost like you’ve got a ball of yarn that’s been tangled into a knot,” he said. “You’re having to pull apart the right pieces at the right time.”

Still, he argues, scientists have a responsibility to explain what’s known, what isn’t and why it matters. “It’s not enough for us to just publish in journals anymore. Our duty to the taxpayer is to communicate the results in a way that people can understand.”

For pioneering contributions that have advanced microbiome science from description to mechanism, Sharpton recently earned the Milton Harris Award in Basic Research and position as the Burgess and Elizabeth Jamieson Chair in Healthspan Research. These honors recognize a body of work that spans high-impact zebrafish experiments, human-relevant translation, openly shared analytical frameworks and a collaborative research ecosystem that has elevated OSU as a hub for microbiome discovery. Reflecting on the Milton Harris Award, Sharpton called it “a milestone. Validation that I’m on the right track.”

The practical stakes of his work are high. If the microbiome helps determine how we process a meal, respond to medication or endure a pollutant, then understanding and, one day, managing these microbial communities could transform treatment for chronic disease.

“What microbiome science is telling us is that we are, in effect, symbiotic organisms,” Sharpton said. “We depend on our microbiome to be healthy.”

To understand human health, we have to listen closely to our gut — and the microbes calling from within.

Learn more about how the small but mighty microscopic world is studied at Oregon State here.

The new data science major builds on Oregon State’s long-standing strengths in statistics, mathematics and computer science, while connecting those tools to real-world applications across the sciences, economics and environmental studies. Administered through the Department of Statistics, the program reflects years of collaboration among faculty across campus.

Rather than duplicating existing degrees, this major complements them. It is designed as both a standalone program and a strong pairing with other fields, allowing students to deepen disciplinary expertise while gaining advanced quantitative and computational skills.

Students can pursue a general data science degree or select from several interdisciplinary options that connect quantitative skills with focused areas of study. These include advanced data science, economics, environmental economics and policy, life science and psychological science.

“Data is always growing. It’s not something that is ever going to go away,” said Erin Howard, senior instructor I in the Department of Statistics. “And so, whatever field students might be interested in, there’s a place for data science.”

Demand for data-literate professionals continues to grow across nearly every sector, including healthcare, technology, government, business and environmental science. National workforce projections show data-related careers growing much faster than average, underscoring the importance of graduates who can interpret complex information and communicate it clearly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 34% growth from 2024 to 2034.

A defining feature of the program is its emphasis on responsible data use. Courses address not only technical proficiency, but also issues of bias, equity and communication. This prepares graduates to work with data in ways that serve the public good.

That approach aligns closely with Oregon State’s mission as a land-, sea-, space- and sun-grant university, where research and teaching are deeply connected to community needs. Faculty across the College of Science already apply data science to challenges such as sustainable resource management, health outcomes and economic resilience; the new major creates a clear academic pathway for students to join that work.

The data science major is initially available on the Corvallis campus, with plans to expand online through Ecampus. Its launch represents both a response to current demand and a signal of where the College of Science is headed, toward deeper collaboration, broader impact and education that reflects the realities of modern science.

For more information about the major, visit the College of Science website.

F.A. Gilfillan Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Science

Davide Lazzati, from the Department of Physics, has received the F.A. Gilfillan Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Science.

Lazzati’s scholarly achievements place him among the most influential astrophysicists of his generation. With more than 190 peer-reviewed publications, over 11,000 citations and an h-index of 57, his work has shaped high-energy astrophysics and multi-messenger astronomy for more than two decades. His research spans theory, computation and observation, and many of his papers are regarded as foundational benchmarks in gamma-ray burst physics, compact-object mergers and the emerging field of gravitational-wave astronomy.

A leader in multi-messenger astrophysics, Lazzati was among the first to predict the electromagnetic signature of a binary neutron star merger — insight that proved essential to interpreting the historic 2017 GW170817 event. His modeling of structured relativistic jets and off-axis emission provided the conceptual framework that allowed scientists to connect gravitational-wave detections with their electromagnetic counterparts. His work continues to guide the field as new detectors expand the frontiers of discovery.

Lazzati’s scholarship is marked by sustained creativity and rigor, supported by a strong record of competitive NASA and NSF funding. He is also a dedicated mentor and leader. Lazzati has advised 10 graduate students, mentored postdoctoral researchers, and guided 28 undergraduate researchers, several of whom have published first-author papers. His early adoption of a formal mentoring compact, now increasingly recognized as a best practice, reflects his commitment to transparency, equity and student success. His leadership as department head further strengthened the inclusivity and effectiveness of the graduate program.

One nominator wrote, "Professor Lazzati’s record of scholarship is nothing short of extraordinary — marked by sustained excellence, transformative impact and remarkable breadth. His work often anticipates new discoveries, redefines longstanding problems and helps set the direction for future studies.”

Milton Harris Award for Basic Research

Thomas Sharpton, professor in the departments of Microbiology and Statistics and the Burgess and Elizabeth Jamieson Chair in Healthspan Research, received the Milton Harris Award for Basic Research.

Sharpton is a pioneering microbiome scientist whose work has fundamentally advanced the basic biological understanding of how host-associated microbial communities function. Since joining Oregon State University in 2013, he has built an interdisciplinary research program that integrates computational biology, statistics and molecular microbiology to uncover the mechanisms by which microbiomes influence health, development and disease. His analytical frameworks, statistical models and experimental systems have become foundational tools used across the field.

His research has produced major insights into how the gut microbiome contributes to inflammatory bowel disease, neurobiological function and parasite infection, among other complex conditions. Sharpton has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, including in Nature, PNAS and Nature Communications, and his work has been cited over 23,000 times. He has secured more than $24 million in research funding from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense and the Moore Foundation, and has developed widely used open-source software and databases that have accelerated microbiome research worldwide.

Sharpton’s leadership has also strengthened OSU’s research ecosystem. As founding director of OSU Microbiome Initiative and director of the OSU Microbiome Core, he has catalyzed interdisciplinary collaborations and expanded access to cutting-edge microbiome technologies. He is a dedicated mentor and educator, having guided more than 40 trainees and co-developed influential courses in microbial bioinformatics and quantitative genomics. His commitment to equity and inclusivity is reflected in his work on NIH and USDA diversity programs and his efforts to improve departmental monitoring practices.

Nominators emphasized both his scientific impact and his collaborative leadership. As one wrote, “His innovative approaches and unwavering commitment to scientific rigor make him an exceptional scholar and an indispensable collaborator.”

Dean’s Early Career Achievement Award

Katherine McLaughlin from the Department of Statistics, received the Dean’s Early Career Achievement Award.

McLaughlin is an internationally recognized expert in developing statistical methods for studying hard-to-reach and hidden populations, including victims of human trafficking and communities at high risk for HIV. Since joining Oregon State University in 2016, she has published 19 peer-reviewed papers in top journals, delivered talks at venues including the CDC and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and helped bring approximately $3.4 million in research funding to OSU.

Her work has had a major global impact. McLaughlin developed the “Visibility SS-PSE” model, now one of the main methods used to estimate population sizes in the UNAIDS Key Population Atlas, helping guide international HIV prevention and treatment policy. She also serves as an advisor to the U.S. Department of State-funded Prevalence Reduction Innovation Forum, helping shape how human trafficking is statistically measured worldwide.

At OSU, McLaughlin played a critical role in the TRACE and PIPP pandemic response projects, designing and analyzing large-scale community COVID-19 surveys and helping integrate wastewater data into public health decision-making.

“My first reaction upon a careful read through her materials is to wonder whether Prof. McLaughlin lives within the same 24-hour day that the rest of us do,” wrote a colleague who nominated McLaughlin. They added that she is “a rare case of ‘the complete package’” whose contributions are “uncharacteristically comprehensive.”

Inaugural Val Nereo Lecture: "Representation Retrieval Learning for Heterogeneous Data Integration"

Date: Monday, Feb. 16, 2026
Time: Reception from 3 to 4 p.m.; Lecture begins at 4 p.m.
Location: Reception held in Weniger 245; Lecture held in Weniger 151

The R2 framework integrates a representation learning module (the "representer") with a sparsity-induced machine learning model (the "learner"). Qu and her team introduce the notion of “integrativeness” for representers, characterized by the effective data sources used in learning representers, and propose a Selective Integration Penalty (SIP) to explicitly improve the property.

Theoretically, her team demonstrates that the R2 framework relaxes the conventional full-sharing assumption in multi-task learning, allowing for partially shared structures, and that SIP can improve the convergence rate of the excess risk bound.

Extensive simulation studies validate the empirical performance of the team's framework, and applications to two real-world datasets further confirm its superiority over existing approaches.

About the speaker: Annie Qu

Annie Qu is a professor in the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. Dr. Qu was a faculty member in Oregon State University's Department of Statistics from 1999 to 2008. She went on to become a Data Science Founder Professor of Statistics and the Director of the Illinois Statistics Office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during her tenure in 2008-2019, and Chancellor's Professor at UC Irvine in 2020-2025.

Qu’s research focuses on solving fundamental issues regarding structured and unstructured large-scale data and developing cutting-edge statistical methods and theory in machine learning and algorithms for personalized medicine, text mining, recommender systems, medical imaging data and network data analyses for complex heterogeneous data.

She was a recipient of the NSF Career award from 2004 to 2009. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Qu was also a recipient of IMS Medallion Award and Lecturer in 2024. She currently serves as Journal of the American Statistical Association Theory and Methods Co-Editor from 2023 to 2025, IMS Program Secretary from 2021 to 2027 and ASA Council of Sections of Governing Board Chair in 2025. She is also the recipient of the 2025 Carver Medal of IMS.

The Val Nereo Lecture Series is made possible through a generous gift from the Val Nereo Women in Applied Statistics Endowed Fund. This series is dedicated to highlighting the work of leading women in statistics and data science, with the goal of inspiring students and scholars — especially women — in our department and broader community.

Heather Kitada Smalley is a passionate statistics professor. She earned her Ph.D. in statistics from Oregon State in 2018, where she discovered her passion for teaching and for applying data to meaningful problems. Today, she is an Albaugh Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Willamette University, where she helped build the university’s new School of Computing and Information Science, from shaping its curriculum to securing a $2 million Department of Education grant that helped bring the programs to life.

Drawing on her Oregon State experience, Smalley designs classes that are both creative and practical. She uses hands-on learning to help students see how data connects to the real world — showing that statistics isn’t about memorizing equations, but about curiosity and discovery.

Read more about her research and teaching philosophy.

Barbara Han's journey to Oregon State began when Distinguished Emeritus Professor Andy Blaustein, who became her Ph.D. advisor, inspired her while she was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University. Her early fascination with amphibians and their ecosystem has grown into a career conducting groundbreaking work at the intersection of ecology, machine learning and infectious-disease prediction.

Today, Han is an Associate Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, where she develops AI-based tools to forecast when and where zoonotic diseases, those transmitted from animals to humans, may emerge. Her models compare traits of known disease-carrying species with thousands of others to predict which animals might become carriers in the future, helping protect lives, ecosystems and communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her team’s predictions about which mammals could spread the virus were later confirmed in the field.

Learn about she is merging ecology and machine learning.

Eileen ('74, '76) and Norbert Hartmann each grew up in modest circumstances where opportunities in science and higher education were slim. With perseverance and family support, they built lives defined by hard work, service and a deep belief in education as a force for opportunity.

Together the Hartmans have made philanthropy a shared mission. Their generosity to Oregon State includes endowments that support faculty in the College of Science and scholarships in women’s basketball and baseball – investments that reflect their belief in education, access and opportunity for future generations. They have also generously given of themselves as advisors to a succession of College of Science Deans - Eileen just recently rotated off of our Board of Advisors, where she is greatly missed.

Discover their journeys from rural towns to fulfilling careers.

The Distinguished Alumni Award, honoring alumni whose work has had an extraordinary impact on science and society. This year’s recipient, Dr. William Skach ('79), played a pivotal role in research that helped transform care for people living with cystic fibrosis.

Skach graduated from Oregon State with degrees in biochemistry and biophysics and crop science, then earned his M.D. at Harvard Medical School. As a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Oregon Health & Science University, he devoted more than 25 years caring for cancer patients and studying how proteins fold inside the body – research that helped lay the groundwork for treatments that revolutionized cystic fibrosis care.

Read about a breakthrough moment in his career.

Professor of Chemistry Emeritus Joe Nibler has spent his career exploring the invisible world of molecular motion – events that unfold in billionths of a second but define how matter behaves. A fourth-generation Oregonian and proud Oregon State graduate, he helped pioneer Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering, a laser-based technique that made it possible to watch molecules reacting in real time and opened new frontiers in experimental chemistry.

With support from the National Science Foundation, he established Oregon State’s first Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering laboratory, bringing laser tools that allowed scientists to observe how molecules move and react on ultrafast timescales. That ability — to see molecular bonds form and change in real time — transformed how scientists study the fundamental processes that power chemistry, from combustion to biology. His work positioned Oregon State among the early leaders in experimental spectroscopy, training generations of researchers who carried those methods forward.

Joe is also celebrated as a teacher and mentor. He co-authored Experiments in Physical Chemistry, a textbook used by students around the world, and mentored generations of scientists who are now advancing science in universities, companies and research labs across the country.

Find out what Nibler finds most rewarding.