Catherine Donnelly

Can we improve pensions savings outcomes for our society? Can a group of people be financially better off in retirement by pooling their savings together and sharing their risks, rather than individually investing their money? Can this be done in a transparent way, so that it is understood by the people in the group? My current interests are to propose and analyse ways in which a group of people can share their risks, with a focus on sharing their investment and mortality risks. Other interests of mine, which are closely related to this topic, are

• Annuities.
• Life insurance.
• Pension funds.
• Portfolio optimization.
• Quantitative risk management.

After my undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge, I worked for several years in the pensions industry in the U.K. in both pensions and investment consultancy roles. I returned to university to do a Masters degree at the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD at the University Of Waterloo, Canada. After a couple of years as a postdoctoral researcher at RiskLab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, I took up a lecturing position at Heriot-Watt in 2011.