A Word from the Director

While 2020 has been a challenging year for many of us, we were very excited to start the new academic year. In this year’s online orientation, the CFRM faculty and staff welcomed 38 new students for our on-campus MS-CFRM program and 12 new students for our online program, joining us from across the country and around the world.

CFRM Program Director Tim Leung with UW mascot Dubs II.

The new undergraduate major in computational finance and risk management (CFRM) has just completed a very successful admission cycle. This competitive major will provide undergraduate students with rigorous training on modern quantitative science with programming and finance.

To facilitate research collaboration and strategic partnership between CFRM and industry, we are excited to launch the CFRM Quantitative Analytics Lab (QAL). Projects at QAL will involve the interplay of big data, quantitative methods, machine learning models, and algorithms to solve the most practical problems in the finance industry and beyond. We’ll continuously engage with industry professionals to create new research projects and other collaborative opportunities. If you have any project ideas, please share with us!

Over the years, the CFRM program and AMATH department have made a series of outreach activities to promote diversity and inclusion. Within the past 12 months, we have played an active role as a partner of Math Alliance to provide mentorship to minority and underrepresented students across the US. We have also attended national STEM diversity conferences and visited several HBCUs, including Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark-Atlanta University. We also continue our tradition of celebrating the success stories of our alumni in our Alumni Spotlight series.

It’s more important than ever for us to stay together and be supportive. The program can serve as the key connector and facilitator for the CFRM community. Together with our students and alumni, we have much to look forward to in the year ahead.