Invited Speakers

Patrick Brockett, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Patrick Brockett

Patrick Brockett holds the Gus S. Wortham Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at The University of Texas at Austin with a joint appointment in the departments of Finance, Mathematics, and Information Risk and Operations Management. He is the Director of the Risk Management and Insurance Program, a former Director of the Actuarial Science Program, and former director of the Center for Cybernetic Studies at the University of Texas. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Risk Management, and is an Elected Member of the International Statistics Institute. He is a former President of the American Risk and Insurance Association, former Editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance, and is the current Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal. He has published over 175 scholarly articles and won numerous awards for his research from the American Risk and Insurance Association, the Casualty Actuarial Society, the Society of Actuaries, the American Statistical Association, and other organizations.


Ian Duncan, University of California Santa Barbara, USA

Ian Dundan

Duncan is adjunct professor of actuarial statistics at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and president of Santa Barbara Actuaries Inc., a provider of healthcare predictive modelling services. From 2010 to 2014 he served as vice-president, clinical outcomes, analytics and reporting at the Walgreens Company. He founded Solucia Consulting (now SCIO Health Analytics), a provider of analytical and consulting services to the healthcare financing industry in 1998. Duncan holds a graduate degree in economics from Balliol College, Oxford and is a post-graduate research student at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries, the Institute of Actuaries, the Conference of Consulting Actuaries and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He is active in public policy and healthcare reform, and served on the board of directors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Health Insurance Connector Authority from 2007 to 2014. He was also a member of the board of the Society of Actuaries (2012-5). Since 2011 he has been a professor in the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at UCSB, where he teaches courses in financial mathematics and life contingencies and a graduate seminar in actuarial research. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed papers, and several books and book chapters. His last book, a second edition of “Managing and Evaluating Healthcare Intervention Programs” (Actex Publications) was published in January 2014.


Edward W. (Jed) Frees, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Edward Frees

Edward W. (Jed) Frees is the Hickman Larson Chair of Actuarial Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in mathematical statistics in 1983 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a fellow of both the Society of Actuaries (SoA) and the American Statistical Association (the only fellow of both organizations). Frees has provided extensive service to the profession, including serving as the founding chairperson of the SoA Education and Research Section, a member of the SoA Board of Directors, a Trustee of the Actuarial Foundation, the Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal, and as an actuarial representative to the Social Security Advisory Board’s Technical Panel on Methods and Assumptions. He has written three books; his most recent is entitled Regression Modeling with Actuarial and Financial Applications. Regarding his research, Frees has published extensively and won several awards for his work. He has won the Society of Actuaries’ Annual Prize for best paper published by the Society, the SoA’s Ed Lew Award for research in modeling, the Casualty Actuarial Society’s Hachmeister award, and the Halmstad Prize for best paper published in the actuarial literature (four times).


Greg Taylor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Greg Taylor

Greg Taylor is an adjunct professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Prior to this, he spent 45 years as a qualified actuary in industry and academia, most of that time as a consulting actuary. He was a director and founding shareholder of Taylor Fry Consulting Actuaries in 1999.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, a doctorate in actuarial mathematics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.