IRES Awards & Scholarships

Chartrand Communications Award

2025 Recipient

• Jessica Luff

Background on the Award:

For more than 20 years, David Chartrand and his incredible associates Susan Morrison, Elaine Bickel, Joy Moore and Art Chartrand were at the helm of IRES. Without the dedication and devotion of these diligent individuals, IRES would not be the organization that it is today. To honor the legacy and work Chartrand Communications did for IRES, the Executive Committee and Board of Directors created the Chartrand Communications Award.

The purpose of this award is to recognize those that have made a difference to IRES through their actions. It rewards individuals who effectively promote IRES’s mission, visibility, and values through communication.

Candidates for this award elevate the IRES’s presence through communication, outreach, and public relations.

Jessica Luff

Ms. Luff was nominated by an IRES Board Member who observed the excellent work she did in promoting IRES and contributing to the increase in membership.

In November 2023, she joined the State Chair group as the State Chair from Delaware.  There was a leadership opening on the State Chair Subcommittee and she quickly stepped up and filled the leadership position. 

She had an immediate impact by implementing Teams calls for the group and updating the State Chairs with everything going on with IRES and keeping the lines of communication open with e-mail updates and monthly meetings.  As part of her communications efforts, she was able to obtain additional nominations for scholarships and awards. She assisted the M&B Committee with their outreach to lapsed members by forwarding the State Chairs the lists from their state and circling back with their responses.

She recently reached out to the NAIC CADs for all the States without a State Chair and was able to add nine (9) new State Chairs for seven (7) states (there’s also one pending who had to check with leadership at their state).  We now have twenty-nine (29) State Chairs, so she helped to grow the team by about 25%. 

Al Greer Achievement Award

2025 Recipient

• Peter McKay

Background on the Award:

In 1998, the IRES Board of Directors established the Al Greer Achievement Award in honor of Al Greer. Mr. Greer was one of the original state insurance examiners who had the vision to establish the Insurance Regulatory Examiners Society in the late 1980s. As a founding father of IRES, Mr. Greer helped fashion the mission of IRES, namely, to raise insurance regulation to a highly respected profession marked by technical proficiency and ethical behavior. He went on to serve on its Board of Directors and was later elected treasurer and was always willing to help wherever he was needed. The Al Greer Achievement Award is presented annually to an insurance regulator and IRES member who not only embodies the dedication, knowledge and tenacity of a professional regulator, but who exceeds those standards. Mr. Greer himself was the first recipient of this award in 1997.

Peter McKay

Mr. McKay was nominated by an IRES Board of Director. Mr. McKay is a Senior Insurance Compliance Officer within the Field Claims Bureau. He started his insurance career in 1986 and worked as a claims adjuster for a few different insurance companies before joining the California Department of Insurance in 2011. Mr. McKay earned a CPCU designation in 1996 and earned his AIE designation in 2012 and CIE designation in 2022. For his extraordinary work in assisting countless consumers with claims issues, he has twice been awarded the California Insurance Commissioner’s Award for Excellence, first in 2015 and again in 2018. When disaster strikes, and it does often in California, Mr. McKay is among the staff that volunteers and travels to various Disaster Recovery Centers, Local Assistance Centers, and Consumer Workshops throughout the state to help catastrophe victims start to put their lives back together. Most recently, Mr. McKay assisted consumers at the FEMA Palisades Disaster Recovery Center, the Eaton Fire Consumer Workshop, and the Palisades Fire Consumer Workshop after the devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area in January of this year. Based on his longevity in the insurance industry and his dedication as a regulator to having assisted hundreds if not over a thousand consumers when they are most vulnerable and at their greatest time of need, Peter McKay was nominated for the 2025 Al Greer Achievement Award.

Schrader-Nelson Publications Award

2025 Recipients

• Brian Werbeloff

• Matthew Gendron

Background on the Award:

In 1994, the IRES Board of Directors established an award for the most significant contributions to IRES publications over the previous year. The Schrader-Nelson Publications Award honors the most outstanding original contribution to the Society’s newsletter, The Regulator®.

Brian Werbeloff and Matthew Gendron

The article entitled, “20 years later: the Market Conduct Surveillance Model Law” was written by Brian Werbeloff and Matthew Gendron. The authors put a lot of effort into the history of the Market Conduct Surveillance Model Law, interviewed regulators, and conducted a survey about the value of the model.

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