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Meet the Spring Insurance Management Lecturers

Meet the lecturers behind the Insurance Management courses this Spring. For full descriptions of each course, visit Curriculum & Courses.

Insurance Operations: The Backbone of the Company, instructed by Marguerite DeMartino, Vice President of Operations, SCOR Reinsurance Company

What happens behind the scenes in operations is of the utmost importance to the business' overall productivity and profitability. Marguerite DeMartino, VP of Operations at SCOR Reinsurance Company, will teach the 14-week course, Insurance Operations: The Backbone of the Company, this spring.

“I want students to understand how operations play a part in every segment of an enterprise. From product development to the end, operations figures out how the product is going to be coded, and put into systems to manage premiums and policies - it's all interconnected. People underestimate operations and say “oh that just happens,” but it doesn't just happen. We have to be involved in the beginning,” says DeMartino.

DeMartino has extensive experience with directing global operations for enterprise-wide initiatives, business improvements, organizational transformation, and process reengineering. In her role at SCOR, DeMartino assists the Senior Vice President in overseeing the Global Property and Casualty Technical Accounting Unit. Prior to that, she worked at AIG as Senior Project Manager for the Domestic Brokerage Group and later as Global Operations Director for treaty reinsurance administration.

Global Legal and Regulatory Ecosystem, instructed by Sandra Bograd, Founder and Managing Director, The Sandra Bograd Group

"The successful insurance leader must have the ability to foresee and proactively address a global industry ecosystem of regulated and interdependent markets, political regimes, competitors, supply chains, customers, imperfect data, cyber environments and communications technologies that make modeling risk in the rapidity of change and possible disruption of core business activities a daily challenge," says Sandra Bograd, lecturer for the Spring course, Global Legal and Regulatory Ecosystem.

In this 7-week course, students will examine case studies and events that drove the current ethical frameworks set by regulators to detect and prevent common ethical violations, transforming their understanding of how law and regulation work together to maximize new ways to cover an ever-expanding sphere of risk horizons.

Bograd runs her own consultancy that provides advice to corporate, governmental, NGO and multilateral institutions on the design and activation of programs of governance, legal risk management, and compliance processes. Previously, she was the Associate General Counsel: Anti-Corruption, AntiBribery, Economic Sanctions and Political Law at Bank of America, from 2012-2014. She was also the VP of Ethics and Business Practices with Freddie Mac (2011-2012), Senior Knowledge Lead with LRN (2008-2011), and SVP and CCO with New York Life Insurance Company (2004-2008).

Underwriting, instructed by Mary Ann Susavidge, Chief Underwriting Officer, AXA XL

Insurance underwriting is the quintessential insurance function, and its impact is felt directly on both the top line and the bottom line of an insurer’s financial statements. In Underwriting, students will learn how to achieve and measure underwriting success with Mary Ann Susavidge, Chief Underwriting Officer of the Environmental Business Unit for AXA. The 7-week course will cover the fundamentals of underwriting life, health, accident, annuity, property, and casualty insurance and how to tie underwriting techniques to organizational profitability and success.

Susavidge has more than 29 years’ experience in environmental insurance and engineering consulting, specializing in the assessment of environmental risk in the context of offering risk management solutions for a range of industries. In her role at AXA, Susavidge's primary responsibilities include management of referral, contract counsel and risk control staff.

Applications are open for Columbia’s Insurance Management master’s program.