Gary is retired from the insurance business after 43 years of actuarial work in the P&C insurance industry. This included appointments at what is or was AIG, MMC, Allianz, Everest Re, NCCI and the Workers Compensation Reinsurance Bureau, where he served as President.
Besides teaching at Columbia, he now is an Adjunct Professor in the Actuarial Department at University of New South Wales in Sydney, which is primarily a research position.
Gary has been teaching actuarial science courses at Columbia University every year since 2003, when the courses were in the Financial Engineering area. He has taught actuarial seminars internationally, including in Brazil, China, France, Portugal, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, and has given conference talks in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Bermuda, Taipei, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, Columbia, and Japan as well.
He has an AB from UC Berkeley in Mathematics and Philosophy (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MS in Mathematics from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary.
Mr. Venter has published over 100 actuarial articles in various venues. On Google Scholar, his i10 index is 21, meaning 21 of his papers have been cited by other authors at least 10 times, and his h-index is 14, meaning that 14 of his papers have been cited 14 or more times. Prizes awarded for his publications are:
- Variance Prize: 2015, 2010
- Ferguson Reinsurance Prize: 2004
- International Actuarial Association Bob Alting von Geusau Memorial Prize: 2006
- Dorweiler Prize: 2003, 1999, 1986
Gary continues to publish actuarial research, with two papers published in refereed journals in 2018. His primary research area currently is replacing MLE with parameter estimation by Bayesian shrinkage.
According to Google Scholar, Gary’s papers have been cited 870 times (as of August 2018).