Parallel Session Speakers

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 and life insurers. 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.

He is an active member of the UK and international actuarial profession: he qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1993; from 1996 to 2017 he was editor of the leading international actuarial journal ASTIN Bulletin - The Journal of the International Actuarial Association; 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.

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.

In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.

Kevin Dowd is Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University Business School. He has written extensively on a number of subjects, including monetary economics, macroeconomics, banking/central banking/financial regulation, pensions and political economy. He has affiliations with the Cato Institute (Washington DC), the Independent Institute (Oakland, CA), the Institute of Economic Affairs (London) and the Pensions Institute (London).

Jean-Marc Fix leads Actuarial R&D at Gen Re. He has over 25 years of experience in the life insurance industry, including an extensive background in life and critical illness insurance product development. For the past decade and a half, he has focused on the topic of mortality and is currently active in a number of SOA committees centering on mortality and underwriting. Jean-Marc chairs the Living to 100 Symposium. He is the past (and initial) chair of the Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Program Steering Committee. He is also a long time member of the Society of Actuaries’ Reinsurance Section Research Team.

He has spoken on a variety of underwriting, product design, claims and reinsurance topics as they relate to actuaries, underwriters and medical directors. He has written articles for On the Risk as well as various actuarial publications.

He received a BA summa cum laude in Mathematics with minors in Chemistry and Computer Science from Whittier College in California.

Richard K. Fullmer, CFA is CEO and co-founder of Nuovalo Ltd., a global PensionTech company that specializes in fair longevity risk pooling. He is also founder of Nuova Longevità Research, a pension research and consultancy firm located in Maryland, USA. Prior to his current roles, he held senior portfolio strategy roles at T. Rowe Price and at Russell Investments, where he specialized in retirement plans, endowments and foundations, and other asset allocation and liability-driven investment problems. His work experience also includes roles at Fidelity Investments and Safeco Insurance.

Mr. Fullmer has written extensively on topics pertaining to longevity and sustainability risk, tontine finance and mortality-pooled investment design, longevity risk pooling, portfolio strategy, spending strategy, and insurance strategy. His publications include TONTINES: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE TO MORTALITY-POOLED INVESTMENTS, CFA Institute Research Foundation Briefs (July 2019), ISBN 978-1-944960-75-9; INDIVIDUAL TONTINE ACCOUNTS, 19(8) Journal of Accounting and Finance (Dec. 2019); A FRAMEWORK FOR PORTFOLIO DECUMULATION, 10(1) Journal of Investment Consulting (Summer 2009); DEFAULTING RETIREMENT DISTRIBUTIONS OUT OF DEFINED-CONTRIBUTION PLANS, 3(3) Journal of Retirement (Winter 2016); and STATE-SPONSORED PENSIONS FOR PRIVATE SECTOR WORKERS: THE CASE FOR POOLED ANNUITIES AND TONTINES, in O.S. Mitchell, ed., New Models for Managing Longevity Risk: Public-Private Partnerships (Feb. 2022), Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780192859808.

Mr. Fullmer is a recipient of the Edward D. Baker III Journal Research Award from the Investments and Wealth Institute, a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Retirement, and has served as a senior partner to the Wharton Pension Research Council at the University of
Pennsylvania. He earned a M.Sc. degree from Boston University.

Yiping Guo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo and a Society of Actuaries Hickman Scholar. Prior to his Ph.D. study, Yiping completed a Master’s degree from the University of Melbourne with a thesis on developing robust statistical machine learning models against outliers. His current research interests lie in utilizing various machine learning techniques to seek rigorous yet interpretable solutions to practical research questions in mortality and climate change risk.

R. Dale Hall, FSA, MAAA, CERA, CFA is Managing Director of Research for the Society of Actuaries Research Institute (SOA).  In his role, Dale is responsible for managing research projects and experience studies across the SOA’s wide variety of actuarial practice areas and markets and coordinating strategic research partnerships. He is a frequent speaker at insurance and retirement industry meetings to highlight SOA research, including research presentations to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and congressional committee testimony on pension plan mortality rates. He has appeared on behalf of the SOA in a variety of media outlets including National Public Radio, C-SPAN and National Geographic’s BREAKTHROUGH series, and hosts the SOA’s Research Insights Podcast.

Prior to joining the SOA in 2013, Dale spent over 20 years in the US insurance industry, primarily as Chief Actuary for the Life/Health companies of COUNTRY Financial and as an adjunct professor in the actuarial science program at Illinois State University.   He earned his MBA in Finance from Capital University and his BS in Mathematics from John Carroll University.

Katja Hanewald is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies and the Coordinator of the Actuarial Co-op Program at UNSW Sydney. She is also the Director of Research of the Ageing Asia Research Hub, which is hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). Her research addresses risk management and insurance responses to population ageing. Katja has published in all leading international insurance and actuarial journals (including the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics and the ASTIN Bulletin) and several major economics journals (including the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization). Her current research investigates optimal retirement financial decisions of older households and the design of retirement financial products such as reverse mortgages, long-term care insurance, and annuities. She teaches risk management courses.

Dr. Abigail Hurwitz is an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research is dedicated to long term saving, consumption and annuity choices. She seeks to better understand financial behavior in order to influence policy as well as to develop and promote savings products and to increase the demand for annuities. Hurwitz has recently worked on projects focused on mandatory annuitization in Israel. Her research also focuses on life and health subjective perceptions and how to influence them in order to enhance saving behavior. Hurwitz holds a Ph.D. in Finance as well as an M.A. and B.A. in Business and Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was previously a Postdoctoral visiting scholar at the Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania.

Doreen Kabuche is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, and a Research Scholar at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). She researches retirement income (pension) products designing, longevity risk and risk management strategies. Her research interest covers many topics, including population ageing, mortality modelling, pension products, health insurance markets, computational finance and energy economics. She holds a Master's in petroleum, Energy Economics and Finance from the University of Aberdeen, UK and a Bachelor's degree in actuarial sciences from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Prior to her doctoral studies, Doreen was a research fellow at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, FSAS, is managing director of Ad Res, an actuarial consulting firm which specialises in quantitative models for insurance and demographic risks as well as reinsurance.

Prior to founding Ad Res in 2011, Kai headed up the European Life Retrocession business of Manulife Reinsurance. He had joined Manulife in 2000 in Toronto in the Reinsurance Pricing team, and later moved to the Structured Reinsurance area. Returning to his home town Cologne in Germany in 2003, Kai was responsible for pricing and marketing life retrocession to the European reinsurance market, later restructuring the business as its lead, as well as developing a longevity reinsurance proposition. Ever since, longevity-related research and development has been at the forefront of Kai’s activities. Besides supporting reinsurers in pricing longevity risk transfer transactions and insurers and pension administrators in managing longevity risk, Kai has published research on mortality and longevity modelling within peer-reviewed actuarial journals (EAJ, NAAJ) and in various industry publications.

Kai holds a degree in physics from Cologne University, is a fellow  of the German Actuarial Association (DAV) and of the Singapore Actuarial Society (SAS). He also volunteers for the US Society of Actuaries, as a member of the organising committee for its triennial Living to 100 Symposium.

Torsten Kleinow is professor at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Research Centre for Longevity Risk at UvA. His research is focused on modelling mortality rates in multiple populations, investigating the impact of socio-economic factors on life expectancy, and studying ways to improve projection models and scenario generators for future human mortality rates. Before joining UvA, Torsten used to hold the position of associate professor at Heriot-Watt University

Mike Krohn, FSA, CERA, MAAA, is a Group Life and Health actuary at Gen Re, focusing on Valuation and Experience Studies.  Before coming to Gen Re, Mike had a variety of roles at Unum and Aetna (now The Hartford) including claim analytics, valuation, capital management, and reinsurance analysis. As chair of the Group Life Experience Committee, Mike is one of the authors for the SOA’s Group Life COVID-19 Mortality Survey, published twice a year, and a frequent speaker on the impacts of COVID-19 on the Group Life insurance products. He is also a member of the Group life Waiver Valuation Table Work Group and serves as a member of the SOA’s Long Term Care Experience Committee. In his free time, Mike enjoys making maple syrup for his friends and family.

Yanxin (Graham) Liu is an associate professor of Actuarial Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He received his PhD in the departments of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo in 2016. His research addresses topics related to longevity risk. He has published in top-tier actuarial and insurance journals, including Insurance: Mathematic and Economics, North American Actuarial Journal, and ASTIN Bulletin.

I-Chien Liu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Insurance and Finance at National Taichung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. His research areas cover embedded options for insurance products, reverse mortgage, mortality modelling and longevity risk. He has published articles in the Journal of Risk and Insurance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, and Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance-Issues and Practice.

Zining Liu completed her Ph.D. at Peking University in China. Her research interests lie in the area of long-term care insurance and pension economics. She is now an Assistant Professor in School of Insurance at Central University of Finance and Economics in China where she has been a faculty member since 2020. She is also the member of Board of Governors in The Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA).

Les Mayhew is Professor of Statistics at the Business School, City, University of  London in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance, and head of Global Research at the International Longevity Centre – UK. He is a former senior civil servant with nearly 20 years of experience in the Department of Health and Social Security, Department of Social Security, HM Treasury and Office for National Statistics, where he was also a director. He was an Associate Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Vienna, for many years, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. He specialises in demographic ageing, health and social care, pensions and housing. In 2004, he co-authored a book entitled the ‘Economic Impacts of Population Ageing in Japan’ and in 2010 wrote a commissioned report for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit entitled ‘The Economic Value of Healthy Ageing and Working Longer’.

Jason McKinley, FSA  is an actuary in his 14th year at RGA. He works in their Global Data and Analytics department on the Risk and Behavioral Science Team, specializing in mortality and morbidity trend analytics. Prior to joining RGA he worked for eight years in social work, helping adults with developmental disabilities for Easterseals Midwest. Prior to that, Jason used his Biology degree, working for six years as a lab assistant at Gold Biotechnology and Pfizer on various projects in the realm of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Maybe his next career change will finally stick! Jason is happily married and in the before-times he and his wife loved to travel.”

Andrey Ugarte Montero is a graduate assistant and PhD candidate in Actuarial Science at HEC Lausanne, Switzerland. He worked as a consultant in actuarial services for Ernst & Young, and has a MSc. degree in actuarial science from the University of Lisbon (ULisboa). He is also pursuing actuarial certification as associate/fellow with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries of the United Kingdom (IFoA). His fields of interest include longevity risks, health and long-term care insurance, social security systems, and data science.

Doris Padilla is a second year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and she is currently pursuing her degree in Statistics and Applied Probability. Her research interests lie in Actuarial science with applications in mortality improvement rate modeling and predictions. Additionally, she has other interests in mathematical finance. She currently holds a master's and bachelor's degree in Actuarial Science awarded at UCSB

Kyu Hyung Park is a Senior Research Associate in the Risk and Actuarial Studies Department at the University of New South Wales, working for the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR). He is working on research projects in the Sustainable Wellbeing in Later Life research stream, focusing on the development of longevity and health risk models and optimal design of health and aged care insurance products with applications to various public sector support policies for retirement incomes and aged care. He recently completed a PhD in Actuarial Studies and Business Analytics at Macquarie University for his work on analysis to find causes and outcomes of medication adherence in aged population.

Mathias D. Plovst is a first year Phd student at Aarhus University – Business and Social Sciences. He researches in the fields of Pension, with a strong emphasis on mortality risks, pension products, derivatives and green (and alternative) asset classes. His master thesis examined macro longevity risk using a unique data set on a Danish pension fund. Further, he has held lectures on mortality models (Multipopulation models) and has assisted in derivatives lectures.

Marjan Qazvini graduated with a PhD in Actuarial Studies from the University of Melbourne. She was Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University from 2017-2022. She has been a member of different working parties of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries including Climate Change for Life Actuaries and COVID-19 Taskforce – Health and Care workstream. She is currently working with Machine Learning working party of the Casualty Actuarial Society. Her research interest is Actuarial Modelling, Machine Learning, Survival Analysis and Risk Theory.

Yang Qiao is a Ph.D. Candidate in finance at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan. Prior to his Ph.D study, he worked as a data mining engineer for several years. His current research interest includes machine learning, risk management and quantitative finance.

Thananya Saksuriyongse is a senior scientist in life and health modeling team at Verisk Analytics, a data analytics and risk assessment company. Thananya has extensive experience on developing mathematical models for transmission of infectious diseases and modeling the mortality with focus on risk factors and major causes of death.

After earning her Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from University of Massachusetts Amherst, she is enthusiastic to use her skillsets in numerical analysis, statistics, and data science to solve real world complex problems and make differences in our approach on modeling mortality at the population level. For almost 6 years working at Verisk Analytics, Thananya leads the development of the major causes of death mortality projection model for 5 different countries including United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Canada, and China, which can be used as a risk evaluation and decision-making tool in life insurance and pension products.  She takes pride in delivering and providing the exceeding and transparent solution to the clients. Additionally, she is eager to engage with decision-makers, researchers, and analysts to exchange thoughts and ideas for the future of life insurance industry.

Pradip Tapadar is a Senior Lecturer in Actuarial Science at University of Kent. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in UK and also a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of India. Pradip's doctoral thesis “The impact of multifactorial genetic disorders on long-term Insurance” was researched at Heriot-Watt University. His undergraduate and postgraduate studies were in Statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, and he holds a postgraduate diploma in Actuarial Science from Heriot-Watt University.

Before coming to academia, Pradip has worked in the life insurance industry; his business exposure includes product development, pricing, valuation, financial reporting, and business planning experience with HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company in India and also with Standard Life in UK.

Pradip’s research interests include:

Economic capital and financial risk management of financial services firms and pension schemes; and
Public policy aspects of insurance risk classification.

Michelle Vhudzijena is a PhD student in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at the University of New South Wales. She graduated from Harvard University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Biomedical Engineering. Before her doctoral studies, she worked as an actuarial consultant and biomedical engineering researcher. Her research interests include mortality modelling using multiple health and socio-economic risk factors, cause of death mortality modelling, long term care, predictive models and survival analysis. Most of her work involves unsupervised learning and analysis of individual level longitudinal data.

Andrés Ramirez Villegas is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at UNSW Sydney and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of  Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) where he was previously a Research Fellow. He completed his doctoral studies at Cass Business School in London focusing on the projection of mortality and the analysis of socio-economic mortality differentials. Andrés’s research interests include longevity risk management, the design of retirement income products and the application of data analytics techniques in actuarial science and finance. Andrés is committed to the development of tools that can help making academic research more accessible to industry and to the wider actuarial community. He is the developer and maintainer of the R Package StMoMo for stochastic mortality modelling which is now being widely used by researchers, longevity risk managers, insurance supervisors and students around the world.

Chou-Wen Wang is a professor in National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. The original area of research is on derivative pricing, derivative pricing, quantitative finance, credit risk and interest rate modeling and spanning from theory to practice. More recently, he also found interests in new areas including stochastic mortality models and mortality-linked derivatives, high dimensional asset models, portfolio performance measures, and dimension reduction in portfolio selection.

Because of the interdisciplinary interests and the dedication to research, Chou-Wen  has been quite productive over the years, with many of the scholarly papers appeared in top finance and actuarial journals, including Journal of Risk and Insurance, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, ASTIN Bulletin, Journal of Derivatives, Journal of Futures Markets and Quantitative Finance.

He has taught many courses in the past, including courses such as Mathematical Finance, Numerical Methods in Finance, Risk Management, Financial Market, Investment Theory, Fixed Income Security, Portfolio Management, Theory and Practice in Options Markets, Personal Finance and Arbitrage Theory and its Applications. The excellence in teaching was also recognizing by receiving the Excellent Performance in Industry-academia Research in 2019-2021.

Hsin-Chung Wang had 8 years working experience at the Cathay Life Insurance Company, the largest insurance company in Taiwan. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistical Information and Actuarial Science, Aletheia University. His major research interest is related to statistics and actuarial science, especially emphasizing on longevity risk and experience study (such as mortality rates and incidence rates). His research work appears in Insurance Mathematics and Economics, ASTIN Bulletin, North American Actuarial Journal and Journal of Population Studies.

Patrick Wiese is an actuary in the Society of Actuaries’ (SOA) research department, where he builds simulation models and database tabulation/visualization tools that cover a diverse range of areas including retirement security, climate change analysis, mortality improvement, and analysis of COVID-19 data. Prior to joining the SOA in 2012, Patrick worked for 10+ years overseas, developing long-range forecasting models of social security and retirement systems in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South America.

Ching-Syang Jack Yue is a consultant and an actuary, as well as a professor of the Statistics Department, National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Jack was the chair of the Taiwan Population Association and is now a leader of Big Data research team at National Chengchi University. He has been incorporating statistical thinking and quantitative analysis into solving the big data problems, especially in the longevity study and its impact on financial management.

Joey Yung completed her Bachelor of Actuarial Studies degree (Hons) at the UNSW School of Risk and Actuarial Studies in 2021. Joey also worked as a research student at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research in Sydney. Her research interest includes mortality modelling and data analytical application.

Kenneth Q. Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Actuarial Science at Arizona State University in the United States. He received his PhD in Actuarial Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) and an Associate of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (ACIA). His research interests include longevity risk management, stochastic mortality modeling, and Bayesian modeling and forecasting. He has published in top-tier statistical, actuarial and insurance journals, including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.