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2 scholars win Kyobo Life founder's global insurance award

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Dr. Pamela Hurley, third from left, poses with Kyobo Life Chairman Shin Chang-jae, second from left, after winning the 2016 Shin Research Excellence Award at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, Monday. From left are International Insurance Society CEO Michael Morrissey, Shin, Hurley and Geneva Association Deputy Secretary General Fabian Sommerrock. / Courtesy of Kyobo Life

By Nam Hyun-woo

Two scholars, one from the United States and one from India, won the International Insurance Society’s (IIS) 2016 Shin Research Excellence Award, an insurance research program endowed by Kyobo Life Insurance, the Korean insurer said Tuesday.

According to the company, the IIS awarded Dr. Pamela Hurley of the University of Houston-Downtown in the U.S. and Dr. Nihar Jangle, climate change program director at Micro Insurance Academy in India as the 2016 Shin Research Award Scholars. The two scholars presented their research during the IIS Global Insurance Forum 2016 in Singapore.

The award, named after Kyobo Life Insurance Company founder Shin Yong-ho, was established in 1997 to commemorate Shin, who was inducted into the Insurance Hall of Fame in 1996 for creating the world’s first education insurance policy.

This is the only award granted to international scholars under the name of a Korean. Some 60 insurance scholars have won this award over the past 20 years.

Under this program, insurance researchers submit research proposals that are judged by a panel of judges, experts and scholars.

Dr. Hurley won the award with her paper “Re-engineering the Insurance Industry for Innovation in Emerging Markets” and Dr. Jangle won with “Climate Cost of Cultivation: A New Crop Index Method to Quantify Farmers’ Cost of Climate-Change.”

The five-day IIS Global Insurance Forum 2016 opened on June 11 under the theme of “Innovation and Industry Transformation.”

Kyobo Life has been supporting insurance scholars through various academic awards in and outside of Korea. In addition to the Shin Research Excellence Awards, the insurer established the APRIA-Kyobo Life Contribution Award for Asian insurance scholars in 2011 and the Daesan Insurance Grand Award in 2006 for domestic insurance scholars.