Professor David Blake
David Blake is Director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, and the chairman of Square Mile Consultants, a training and research consultancy. He is also: co-founder of the International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conferences; co-inventor of the Cairns-Blake-Dowd stochastic mortality model; and co-founder with JPMorgan of the LifeMetrics Indices. In 2011, he won the Robert I. Mehr award from the American Risk and Insurance Association for his seminar paper on mortality risk transfers. The paper is credited with helping to develop a new global capital market in mortality risk transfers between pension funds, life assurers and capital market investors, leading to the world's first pension buy-out in 2006 and the world's first pension buy-in and first longevity swap in 2007.
Professor Richard MacMinn
Professor Richard D. MacMinn, BA, MA, PhD, is the first holder of the Edmondson-Miller Chair in Insurance and 
Financial Services at Illinois State University and was previously the first holder of the Swiss Re Chair in the Management of Risk at the University of Nottingham. He was editor of the Journal of Risk and insurance, the lead journal in the world on insurance and risk management, published by the American Risk and Insurance Association from 1998 through 2006. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Journal of Insurance Issues and the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Finance. Professor MacMinn served as a board member of the Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association from 2000-2003, as a board member for the American Risk and Insurance Association from 2003-2006 and is a member of the American Risk and Insurance Association, Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association, European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists, Southern Risk and Insurance Association, Western Risk and Insurance Association, American Economic Association and American Finance Association. He has published in journals including the journal of Risk and Insurance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Geneva Papers, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Finance. He has thrice won the prestigious Mehr Award in addition to a number of other awards from the American Risk and Insurance Association, Casualty Actuarial Society, and General Insurance Research Organization in the United Kingdom and Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association for his publications.