Certificate in Data Science – One year on

Speakers

John Taylor

John is an External Member of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Committee. He is also Chairperson of the Scottish Financial Risk Academy Group, a collaborative venture between industry and academia on a range of risk topics, including climate and cyber risks.

He is particularly interested in technology in financial services and recently helped create a fintech product to deliver financial advice to consumers. He has championed the greater adoption of data science and artificial intelligence by the actuarial profession. 

Previously, John held several senior leadership roles in the long-term savings industry. These included: Partner at Hymans Robertson (2014-20), Managing Director at NEST, Customer & Proposition (2013 – 2014), Marketing Director at Lloyds Banking Group (2007 – 2012) and various director roles at Standard Life (1994-2007).

John holds a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Glasgow as well as post-graduate diploma from Heriot Watt University.

Colin Thores 

Colin is one of the IFoA’s Education Actuaries. Colin was heavily involved in the development and implementation of the IFoA’s Certificate in Data Science, and is looking at developing further data science related educational content for the IFoA. Colin has spoken about data science education at a number of IFoA events.

Philip Darke

Philip is an actuary and consultant at Mercer in Edinburgh. In 2018 he was awarded an EPSRC scholarship to carry out PhD research at Newcastle University, where he uses machine learning to model and predict health trajectories using Electronic Health Record data. Philip sits on the Scottish Board and Electronic Health Records working party and has spoken on data science at a number of IFoA events.

Josephine Robertson

Josephine Robertson is a Health & Care /Risk Actuary with keen interest in the interplay of demographic risk, public health, policy, health systems and insurance industry. She is currently working with the NHS to deliver a population health management skills development programme.  She is an active volunteer within the actuarial profession including the COVID-19 Action Taskforce, professional education process and the Population Health Management research working party.

Sam Blanchard

Sam Blanchard is a part qualified systems actuary who has been working across Life, Pensions and Investments for the last 15 years, with a strong leaning towards automation. Currently working on a systems migration for a large life insurer which involves using Python skills picked up from the Data Science certificate.
 

Charchit Agrawal

Charchit Agrawal is a GI actuary with over 12 years of experience working largely in reserving roles, and currently he is the chief actuary for a GI insurer in Malaysia. He strongly believes that actuaries should be pro-actively focussing their time on business analysis where the value-addition could be the highest instead of having to take care of process inadequacies. He is earnestly trying to learn programming in an attempt to self-build automated reserving and claims models. He is also an active volunteer with the IFoA notably through the GI Asia working party and as the Chief Examiner for SP7.