Longevity 19 Hosts
David Blake
Professor David Blake is Director of the Pensions Institute at, City University of London, and chairman of Square Mile Consultants, a
training and research consultancy. He is also: co-designer of the PensionMetrics life-cycle financial planning software; co-author of the A2Risk attitude to risk questionnaire; co-inventor of the Cairns-Blake-Dowd stochastic mortality model; and co-founder with JPMorgan of the LifeMetrics Indices. In 2014, he was appointed Chair of the Independent Review of Retirement Income. Its report We Need a National Narrative: Building a Consensus around Retirement Income was published in March 2016 (pensions-institute.org/IRRIReport.pdf). He won the 2016 Robert I. Mehr Award for ‘A Two-Factor Model for Stochastic Mortality with Parameter Uncertainty: Theory and Calibration’ (with Andrew J. G. Cairns and Kevin Dowd) published in the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the journal of the American Risk and Insurance Association. This Award is presented each year for the paper published in the JRI ten years before that has best stood the test of time. He has a PhD from LSE.
Andrew Cairns
Andrew Cairns is Professor of Actuarial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and at the Maxwell Institute for
Mathematical Sciences.
He is well known both in the UK and internationally for his research in financial risk management for pension plans, life insurers and, more recently, renewable energy projects. In recent years, his research has focused on the modelling of longevity risk: how this can be modelled, measured and priced, and how it can be transferred to the financial markets. Amongst his work in this field, he has developed a number of new and innovative stochastic mortality models, most notably the CBD family. He has also worked extensively on inequalities in all-cause and cause of death mortality, and the evolving impact of Covid-19 on current and future mortality.
His research has received several international prizes including the Halmstad Prize in 2008, the Society of Actuaries Annual Prize in 2009 and the Robert I. Mehr Award in 2016.
Much of his research is focused on delivering rigorous solutions to problems of practical importance. This has resulted in three highly-rated impact case studies for the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the award of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society's inaugural Impact Prize in 2022.
He is an active member of the UK and international actuarial profession: he qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1993; he has held senior editorial roles at ASTIN Bulletin - The Journal of the International Actuarial Association (1997 to 2017) and Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (since 2023); and in 2005 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Swiss Association of Actuaries. From 2016-2020 he was Director of the Actuarial Research Centre of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.