David Blake
Professor David Blake is Director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, 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 JRIten years before that has best stood the test of time. He has a PhD from LSE.
Andrew Cairns
Professor Andrew Cairns is Professor of Financial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and Director of the Actuarial
Research Centre of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. He is well known internationally for his research in financial risk management for pension plans and life insurers. In recent years, he has been working 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.
He has been awarded a number of prizes for his work on mortality including the Halmstad Prize from the Society of Actuaries and the Robert I Mehr Prize from the American Risk and Insurance Association.
He qualified as an actuary in 1993, was elected as a corresponding member of the Swiss Association of Actuaries in 2005 and, in 2016, was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh - Scotland's national academy of science and letters.