People / Students / Class of 2025
Iris (Zongzhen) Lee graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2021 with a bachelor's degree in Financial Actuarial Mathematics and a minor in Statistics. During her academic career, she developed a strong technical foundation stemming from her deep interest in mathematics and explored interdisciplinary fields encompassing statistics, finance, and actuarial science. Iris also conducted projects involving machine learning frameworks such as classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction through data manipulation and visualization using Python, SQL, and R. As she navigates the professional world, her passion for data analysis consistently prevails in every role she undertakes. During her internship at Trupanion as a Pricing Actuarial Intern, she helped develop and implement new insurance premium cost factors that enhanced the capture of liabilities and improved the medical loss ratio. For her final project, she leveraged internal data to model time series forecasting for premium pricing using XGBoost. Upon graduation, Iris worked at Mercer as a Wealth Consulting Actuarial Analyst, where she utilized quantitative analysis to evaluate retirement plans' assets and liabilities and explored derisking opportunities to extract potential cost savings for clients. Working in a consulting role, Iris developed strong actuarial and financial acumen through self-learning in fast-paced, cross-functional teams. Her time and project management skills enabled her to work efficiently, lead, and become a reliable source of knowledge in her industry. While dedicating the past years to gaining valuable professional experiences, Iris is no stranger to maintaining a consistent commitment to continuous learning. Beyond her demanding work hours, she spent hundreds of hours studying and successfully completed a series of actuarial exams and earned a certificate in Data Science and Machine Learning from MIT. Humbled by the opportunity and upon completing the program, Iris hopes to acquire profound insights into cutting-edge technologies and, along with her professional experiences, become a more proficient and creative problem solver in the diverse and evolving realm of data science.
