Perspectives

Alumnus Robert Frey, (Ph.D. 1987)
Marketing Director, Renaissance Technologies Corporation
Robert Frey holds both B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Statistics. “My whole education took place part-time. It took me 12 years. I was a nontraditional student in every way, from a family in which no one in the previous generation had gone to college.”

During his 12 years of part-time study, Frey was simultaneously moving ahead in the business world. He was initially a management analyst for the IRS, then an operations researcher for Doubleday Book Co. and later for European-American Bank; on the side, he started his own consulting firm. “I like that I can change fields and rapidly become involved in new careers,” he said. “With the proper quantitative background, you can develop powerful cognitive facilities. I have learned to pick up on important business factors fast.”

At the time he wrote his dissertation, he was head of the 25-person operations research/artificial intelligence group at the Harris Corporation. Among other projects at Harris, Frey led an analysis of how to design a military airplane so that automated testing equipment could diagnose faults in complex electronic systems. A new generation of Navy fighter planes was developed under the guidelines Frey proposed. After his Ph.D., he moved to Morgan Stanley’s trading operation where he helped build a mathematically based trading system. He then became a founding partner of Kepler Financial Management, Ltd., which ran a computerized equities fund. In the early 1990s, Kepler was purchased by Renaissance Technologies Corp., one of the country’s most successful hedge fund managers, and Frey became a Managing Director at Renaissance. Recently he began work on broadening Renaissance’s products into more traditional areas of investment management.

Alumna Terri McNamee (M.S. 1991)
Assistant Manager, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes
Terri McNamee earned a B.S. in Mathematics and Philosophy at the State University at Oswego. Before joining the technical workforce, she wanted further education that combined mathematics with business. So she enrolled in the Stony Brook Applied Mathematics and Statistics graduate program to get a master’s degree in Operations Research. Her investigations about possible jobs after getting the M.S. led her to look into the actuarial field, where many entry-level people are also employed right out of college. She took and easily passed the first actuarial exam. Early the following year, she went to the annual Actuarial Career Day in New York City where she got more information about the three actuarial disciplines: pension consulting, life insurance, and property and casualty.
“Being a Pension Actuary appealed to me because I liked the idea of having client contact. It seemed like the perfect fit for combining business with mathematics, and I feel the same way today,” she said. McNamee passed her resume to many consulting firms present at the Actuarial Career Day and by April had two job offers, as well as passed a second actuarial exam. She started her actuarial career in August 1991 working for Cooper & Lybrand in New York City. In February 1994, McNamee moved to Sedgwick Noble Lowndes on Long Island and in time became the assistant manager of the Defined Benefits Department. She became an Associate of the Society of Actuaries in May 1994 and a Pension (Enrolled) Actuary in April 1998. “What does a Pension Actuary do? Using actuarial assumptions and principles, we anticipate the total liability, accrued liability, and annual cost of a company’s pension plan.”

Alumna Ann Tucker (Ph.D. 2000)
Director, Ivy Asset Management
After college, Ann Tucker went to medical school (but did not complete her clinical rotations) and then worked for two years as a biostatistician. She decided she wanted to get a Ph.D. in biomathematics at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences along with finishing her M.D. But she found Courant too theoretical for her tastes and biomathematics not as appealing as she hoped. In Spring 1997, after three semesters at Courant, Ann transferred to Stony Brook. She took courses in parallel computing, computational geometry, mathematical finance, and data analysis. She decided to focus on applied statistics for her dissertation research, building on her biostatistics background. She initially taught statistics as a teaching assistant, and in December 1999 she and four other Applied Mathematics graduate students were offered industrial research assistantships to help develop statistical financial models for Credite Suisse First Boston (CSFB). CSFB had just established a small research office near the Stony Brook campus to take advantage of Stony Brook’s pool of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science graduate student talent. After defending her thesis in September 2000, Ann took a job at the investment firm of Bear Stearns at the rank of a junior vice president. Ann is now Director for Quantitative Strategies at Ivy Asset Management, hedge fund management division of the Bank of New York.

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