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The Index of Scottish Life Expectancy (THISLE) (mortality inequalities mapping tool)

CV

Andrew Cairns is well known both in the UK and internationally for his research in mortality modelling, and 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. His work also extends to statistical analysis of mortality and health inequalities and understanding why these arise.

Other work includes the modelling of interest rate risk and quantitative risk management for renewable energy operators.

He is an active member of the UK and international actuarial profession in both research and education: he qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1993; from 2007 to 2017 he was editor-in-chief of the leading international actuarial journal ASTIN Bulletin; he has been an editor of Insurance: Mathematics and Economics since 2023; and in 2005 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Swiss Association of Actuaries. In 2008 he was awarded the Halmstad Prize for the paper Pricing Death: Frameworks for the Valuation and Securitization of Mortality Risk co-authored with David Blake and Kevin Dowd. In 2016 he was awarded the Robert I. Mehr award for the best paper published in 2006 in the Journal of Risk and Insurance.

In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh - Scotland's national academy of science and letters. And in 2026, he was appointed as a Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.

I am passionate about risk management in general and specifically the impact that it can have on the successful running of pension plans and life insurers.

At Heriot-Watt University, I am part of the Data and Decisions Group.

My current research focuses on three related themes:

• the modelling and management of longevity risk and how this can be transferred to the capital markets;
• mortality and health inequalities - how significant are these and what are the drivers of inequality: e.g. see The Index of Scottish Life Expectancy;
• using cause-of-death mortality data to understand better the drivers of mortality inequality and general mortality trends.