Professor Frank Quan of Actuarial Science and Risk Management has been appointed as a Brad and Karen Smith Professorial Scholar by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Quan is an affiliate professor of statistics and affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The named professorship title is based upon the recognition of Quan's outstanding contributions to the college's educational mission including teaching and mentoring in Mathematics. 

Quan is also a faculty advisor for the Illinois Risk Lab, which facilitates research activities that integrate academic training with practical problem-solving in real business settings. Quan's research areas include data science applications in insurance such as tree-based models, natural language processing, deep learning, and applies his actuarial expertise to build predictive models. He has received the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award and has been awarded by the Society of Actuaries Research Institute.