AUSTIN, Texas—Buck Consultants, one of the world’s leading human resource and benefits consulting firms, announced today that it has funded the position of Buck Consultants Assistant Director of Actuarial Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Leslie Vaaler will be the initial Buck Consultants Assistant Director of Actuarial Studies. She is the co-author of “Mathematical Interest Theory,” a new textbook scheduled for publication by Prentice Hall in March 2006.
Starting with the spring semester of 2006, Buck Consultants will provide annual financial support to relieve an actuarial faculty member from teaching one non-actuarial course per semester, in order to advise students and perform other important administrative duties. This funding exceeds the annual income available from a standard newly endowed professorship at the university. The renewable agreement is for an initial period of five and a half years.
“Buck’s support of an assistant director will allow the university to better serve the needs of its students and the actuarial program by enabling our staff to focus even more time on teaching, service and research,” says Dr. Jim Daniel, Associate of the Society of Actuaries (A.S.A.), director of actuarial studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
“While common in such areas as accounting and law, external funding of faculty positions in actuarial education is uncommon. As far as I can determine, fewer than 10 positions have been named for their insurance company donors, fewer than 10 have been named to honor individuals and none have been named for consulting company donors,” says Daniel. “Buck Consultants has shown real leadership in taking this action.”
“We are proud to support the actuarial program at The University of Texas,” says Howard Fine, Buck Consultants’ executive managing director. “Buck shares with the university a strong commitment to the actuarial profession, and we are honored to team with such a prestigious institution.”
“Buck has been recruiting top tier actuarial students from The University of Texas for more than 20 years and we have been a member of the university’s Actuarial Studies Advisory Council since the Council’s inception in 1989,” says Tamara Shelton, managing director of the retirement practice at Buck Consultants. “We are proud to help develop the university’s outstanding graduates.”
The actuarial program at The University of Texas at Austin was founded in 1913, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Housed in the Mathematics Department, its nearly 200 students rank it as one of the largest in the United States. The program’s graduates work throughout the world in many areas of actuarial practice—consulting, insurance and government.
Buck Consultants, an independent subsidiary of Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS), is a leader in human resource and benefits consulting with more than 1,500 professionals worldwide. Founded in 1916 to advise clients in establishing and funding some of the nation’s first public and private retirement programs, Buck is an innovator in the areas of retirement benefits, health and welfare programs, human resource management, compensation and employee communication.
ACS, a Fortune 500 company with more than 55,000 people supporting client operations in nearly 100 countries, provides business process outsourcing and information technology solutions to world-class commercial and government clients. The company’s Class A common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ACS.
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