50 Outstanding Actuarial Thought Leaders Globally

Last updated: June 2026

The fifty people on this list represent the most important voices currently shaping actuarial science across insurance, pensions, climate risk, longevity, data science, and the expanding frontier of what the profession does in the world. They are researchers, practitioners, presidents of global professional bodies, innovators building entirely new models of insurance, and advocates ensuring the profession grows into every geography that needs it most. As of June 2026, actuarial thought leadership has never been more consequential or more global.

The actuarial profession has one of the most resilient job markets of any professional discipline, with unemployment rates that typically sit below one percent even in periods of broader economic uncertainty, according to DW Simpson's 2026 actuarial market trends analysis. That stability reflects something deeper: the world is becoming more complex, more risk-laden, and more data-saturated, and actuaries are among the best-positioned professionals to make sense of it all. Half of the top ten global risks identified in the World Economic Forum's Global Risk Report 2026 relate directly to climate and nature, which is not just a statistical observation but an invitation for the profession to step further into public life.

This list was assembled to surface the voices genuinely advancing the discipline right now, whether through research that is reshaping how the profession models mortality or climate, through professional leadership that is expanding who the profession reaches, or through entrepreneurial work that is creating entirely new categories of risk transfer. It spans the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the African continent more broadly. Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every general finance or risk list, I wanted to surface the leaders who deserve to be far better known outside the profession itself.

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Why Does Actuarial Thought Leadership Matter?

Actuarial thought leadership matters because the problems actuaries work on are the problems that will define the next century, and the quality of public thinking on those problems depends on whether the profession's best minds are willing to share their work in ways that non-specialists can understand and act on.

The actuarial lens is genuinely distinctive. It combines long time horizons, rigorous probabilistic thinking, deep data literacy, and professional accountability in a way that no other discipline quite replicates. When actuaries bring that lens to climate risk, they can quantify what politicians can only describe. When they apply it to longevity, they can design retirement systems that hold together across demographic shifts that would otherwise bankrupt them. When they point it at cyber risk or pandemic risk or biodiversity loss, they are producing the ground truth that the rest of the financial system needs to price and manage exposure. More than 80 percent of actuaries surveyed in the IFoA's 2025 thematic review reported that the profession's involvement in climate and sustainability work has increased significantly compared to three to five years earlier.

The challenge is that actuarial thought leaders have historically been reluctant communicators. The profession has tended to work through formal channels, professional bodies, and peer-reviewed journals, rather than public platforms. That is changing, partly from necessity and partly because a new generation of practitioners understands that the profession's influence depends on its ability to be understood. The people on this list are among those driving that shift.

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How This List Was Compiled

This directory was assembled by reviewing professional bodies, academic institutions, conference programmes, published research, and LinkedIn activity across the global actuarial community. Selection focused on current substantive contribution to the field through published research, professional leadership, public commentary, or practitioner innovation. Geographic and disciplinary diversity were both deliberate priorities. People who appear primarily as conference speakers without independent corroboration of their standing were not included.

Category 1: Profession Leaders

The professional body presidents and governance leaders who set the direction of actuarial practice represent the profession's most visible external voice. Their decisions about what the profession emphasises, whom it recruits, and how it engages with governments and regulators shape the entire field. The IFoA alone represents and regulates more than 34,000 members worldwide across every actuarial sector. The people in this category are not just figureheads: they are making active decisions about where actuarial expertise is applied and how it is communicated to the world.

1. Paul Sweeting

Among the most widely connected individuals in global actuarial life, Paul Sweeting is currently serving as President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the UK's chartered professional body for actuaries, in a two-year term that began in July 2025 and is the first of its kind under the IFoA's reformed governance structure. He is also a director of Tawuniya Insurance, one of the largest insurance companies in the Middle East, which gives him an operational grounding in risk leadership that many academic-track professionals lack.

Sweeting is an Honorary Professor of Actuarial Science at the University of Kent and a Visiting Professor at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, and he wrote the textbook for the profession's SP9 Enterprise Risk Management subject. His presidential address in July 2025, delivered at Staple Inn Hall in London, challenged the profession to ask whether it is still producing genuinely innovative research that sets it apart as a thought leader across traditional areas like pensions and insurance and newer areas like climate change, and to make that research more visible both inside and outside the profession.

2. Win-Li Toh

Win-Li Toh served as the 2025 President of the Actuaries Institute of Australia and is a Principal at Taylor Fry, one of Australia's leading actuarial and analytics consultancies. Her presidency championed community, connection, and collaboration as the connective tissue of the profession, and she used the platform to champion actuaries as trusted advisors capable of bridging technical complexity and public communication in ways that create real social value.

She was the lead author on the Actuaries Institute's cyber green paper, which explored the challenges and opportunities facing decision-makers in building a vibrant and sustainable cyber insurance market in Australia. She was also named 2023 Insurance Leader of the Year by the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance, a recognition that reflects her standing not just within the actuarial profession but across the broader insurance industry. Her transition of the presidential baton to Scott Reeves at the end of 2025 was widely noted as one of the most gracious handovers in the Institute's recent history.

3. Marjorie Ngwenya

Marjorie Ngwenya is among the most globally significant figures to have led a major actuarial professional body in recent decades, having served as President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in 2017-18 as the first non-UK-based president in the organisation's then-160-year history, the youngest president, the third female president, and the first person of colour to hold the role. Born in the UK and raised in Zimbabwe, her career has spanned Deloitte, Swiss Re, Mazars, Old Mutual Africa, and Liberty Group South Africa, where she served as Chief Strategist and then Chief Risk Officer of African Operations.

She is currently a non-executive director in the financial services sector, a Senior Advisor at Sand Technologies, and a member of the Prudential Regulation Committee of the Bank of England, appointed in 2022. Her thought leadership centres on the intersection of actuarial science, strategic leadership, and diversity, and she has been an outspoken voice on expanding the profession's reach into underserved African markets, including as founding Executive Director of the African Leadership University's School of Insurance.

4. Scott Reeves

Scott Reeves took over as 2026 President of the Actuaries Institute of Australia from Win-Li Toh at the end of 2025, beginning a presidency that arrives as Australian insurers are navigating a cascade of compounding pressures from geopolitical risk, climate-amplified catastrophe losses, and evolving regulatory expectations. He has deep experience in general insurance and reinsurance across Australia, Asia, and the UK, with a background that spans client management, business management in general insurance, and consulting outside the insurance sector.

As 2026 President, he is leading the Institute through a period when actuarial involvement in climate and sustainability work is accelerating, and when the profession is being asked to expand its advisory footprint into areas it has traditionally not occupied, including geopolitical risk analysis and multi-rhythm leadership for insurers facing simultaneous pressure from structured planning and real-time crisis response.

5. Kartina Tahir Thomson

Kartina Tahir Thomson served as President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in 2024-25, and is currently Senior Director at WTW where she leads the risk, regulation, and governance proposition. She brings 25 years of actuarial, risk management, governance, and regulatory experience, spanning a Big Four audit firm, the Bank of England, global insurance carriers, and brokers, making her one of the most operationally experienced people to have led the IFoA in recent memory.

She has held leadership positions in the actuarial profession both in the UK and globally, having served on the IFoA Council for eight years. Her term as IFoA President was shaped by the continuing pressure on the profession to demonstrate its relevance in climate risk, IFRS 17 implementation, and the AI governance debate, and she has been a consistent advocate for actuaries stepping into the public conversation on all three of those fronts rather than leaving them to adjacent disciplines.

6. Darrell Knapp

Darrell Knapp served as President of the American Academy of Actuaries from 2024 to 2025, the only US-based organisation solely focused on serving the public and the US actuarial profession. He led the Academy through a period of significant external attention to actuarial competency frameworks, AI governance standards, and evolving expectations from regulators on how actuaries should document and communicate the limitations of their models.

The Academy under his leadership expanded its presence at research conferences including the 2025 Actuarial Research Conference in Toronto, where Knapp led Academy speakers in support of academic research and actuarial science programs. The Academy has 20,000 members and serves as the primary interface between US actuarial practice and US public policy, and Knapp's tenure helped position it as a more proactive contributor to regulatory and legislative discussions on climate, health, and retirement.

Category 2: Longevity, Retirement and Pension Risk

The challenge of funding long lives across increasingly uncertain demographic trajectories is among the most consequential actuarial problems of the century. The people in this category are pushing the frontier on how pension systems are designed, how longevity risk is transferred, how retirees can be protected against running out of money, and how social security systems can remain solvent under climate and demographic pressure. Their work matters to every government, insurer, and individual trying to plan for a financially secure later life. For related pension and retirement voices from adjacent disciplines, visit the companion post on 

For related pension and retirement voices, visit the companion post on pension and retirement fund thought leaders

7. Anna Rappaport

Anna Rappaport is one of the most experienced and deeply respected voices in retirement research globally, with a career spanning more than five decades in actuarial consulting, retirement plan design, and advocacy. She is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a past president of that organisation, and she remains one of the most prolific contributors to research on the human dimensions of retirement that quantitative models frequently undercount: health transitions, cognitive decline, the experience of retirement as a life stage rather than a balance sheet outcome.

Her research through the Society of Actuaries' Committee on Post-Retirement Needs and Risks has produced some of the most cited work on the gap between how financial planners model retirement and how people actually experience it. She is a consistent voice for ensuring that retirement security conversations include the realities of informal caregiving, housing transitions, and the wildly uneven distribution of financial literacy that means actuarially sound retirement systems often fail the people who need them most.

8. Moshe Milevsky

Moshe Milevsky is a Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto and one of the most prolific actuarial authors alive, with fifteen books and more than sixty peer-reviewed articles spanning financial mathematics, pension economics, actuarial science, and the history of annuities. He is a member of the Graduate Faculty in Mathematics and Statistics at York University and a Fellow of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, and he has lectured at institutions including the Wharton School, the London School of Economics, and Goethe University.

His most recent book, Longevity Insurance for a Biological Age, challenges the conventional actuarial practice of using chronological age as the basis for retirement income planning and argues for a more scientifically grounded approach that incorporates biomarkers of ageing. That argument is not just theoretical: it points toward a fundamental rethinking of how annuity pricing and pension drawdown strategy should work in a world where individual biological age diverges increasingly from calendar age.

9. David Blake

David Blake is Professor of Pension Economics and founding director of the Pensions Institute at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, one of the world's most influential academic centres for pensions and longevity research. He has been organising the Longevity conferences, the leading international gathering of longevity risk researchers and practitioners, for nearly two decades, and the networks those conferences have built are among the most important in the global pension risk transfer industry.

His research spans longevity risk modelling, pension fund management, defined contribution plan design, and the behavioural economics of retirement. He has been a consistent advocate for the development of longevity bond markets as a mechanism for transferring longevity risk from pension funds and insurers to capital markets, a position that remains both technically rigorous and commercially ambitious.

10. Andrew Cairns

Andrew Cairns is Professor of Financial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a leading international voice on financial risk management for pension plans and life insurers. His work on stochastic mortality modelling, including the Cairns-Blake-Dowd mortality models that are among the most widely used in industry, has shaped how pension actuaries think about longevity uncertainty and how firms price and hedge longevity risk.

He served as Director of the Actuarial Research Centre supported by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, which positioned him at the intersection of academic research and professional practice in a way few researchers achieve. His research continues to push at the frontier of how mortality models should be calibrated, validated, and applied in regulatory contexts, with particular attention to the assumptions that drive uncertainty in long-run mortality projections.

11. Johnny Siu-hang Li

Johnny Siu-hang Li is a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, holding a PhD in Actuarial Science and a Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries, and he has won multiple major actuarial research prizes including the SOA Redington Prize and the SOA Edward A. Lew Award. He serves as Editor of the Annals of Actuarial Science and Co-Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal, two of the most important publication venues in the field.

His research focuses on the pricing, hedging, and measurement of longevity risk, and he has contributed methods for managing exposure to demographic uncertainty that are in practical use at life insurers and pension funds across Asia and beyond. In 2018, the SOA awarded his thirteen-member research team a significant grant to develop solutions for mitigating the risks that climate change poses to the insurance industry, reflecting the extent to which his work bridges the longevity and climate risk conversations that are often pursued separately.

12. Cord-Roland Rinke

Cord-Roland Rinke is Managing Director of Hannover Re's Life and Health Analytics and Longevity division, with global responsibility for longevity business and data analytics. Hannover Re has been among the most active reinsurers in developing the longevity risk transfer market, working to move longevity risk from pension schemes and insurance companies onto its book through bespoke longevity swap and reinsurance arrangements.

Rinke's work represents the practitioner counterpart to the academic research on longevity that dominates the academic literature: he is responsible for actually pricing, structuring, and managing longevity risk at scale in real transactions. His presence on the faculty of conferences like Longevity 20 demonstrates the degree to which the boundary between academic longevity research and industry practice has become genuinely porous, with practitioners shaping research questions as much as academics are shaping commercial approaches.

13. Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald

Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald is the Director of Financial Security Research at the National Institute on Ageing at Toronto Metropolitan University and one of Canada's most influential voices on retirement income security. Her research sits at the intersection of actuarial science, public policy, and behavioural economics, and she has been particularly effective at translating complex arguments about retirement income adequacy into forms that policymakers and the media can engage with.

Her work challenges the conventional Canadian view that Registered Retirement Savings Plans and self-directed savings vehicles are sufficient to produce retirement security, and she has advocated with rigour and persistence for policy changes that would make the Canadian retirement system more universally reliable. Her public profile as a researcher who is willing to engage directly with policy debates makes her a distinctive voice in a profession that has often preferred to influence quietly.

Category 3: Climate, Catastrophe and Emerging Risk

The actuarial profession's relationship to climate risk has undergone a rapid transformation. Five years ago, most climate risk actuarial work was fringe or aspirational. Today it is mainstream, regulatory, and commercial. The people in this category are doing the most substantive work on how actuaries quantify, communicate, and build products around physical climate risk, transition risk, catastrophe risk, and the emerging category of nature risk and biodiversity loss. Their work is increasingly shaping what government regulators, central banks, and institutional investors require from the financial system.

14. Louise Pryor

Louise Pryor served as President of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries from 2021 to 2022 and used that platform to push climate risk into the centre of actuarial professional discourse more forcefully than any previous IFoA president had done. She has continued as a consultant and researcher on climate-related financial risk since leaving the presidency, maintaining a public profile that brings the actuarial perspective to the ESG, TCFD, and mandatory disclosure debates that are reshaping corporate reporting globally.

Her willingness to argue publicly that climate change is an existential risk requiring urgent actuarial attention, not merely a long-term planning assumption to be modelled cautiously, has made her a distinctive voice in a profession that has traditionally preferred understatement. The IFoA's increased engagement with climate research and public policy submissions owes a significant debt to the agenda she established during her presidency.

15. Gordon Woo

Gordon Woo is a scientist at RMS, the catastrophe risk modelling firm now operating as a division of Moody's, and he is among the most original thinkers working at the intersection of mathematics, history, and insurance. His 2011 book Calculating Catastrophe offered one of the most rigorous and accessible treatments of how catastrophe models are built, validated, and should be interpreted, and it remains a standard reference for practitioners and students working in natural catastrophe insurance.

His research has extended into pandemic risk, terrorism risk, and the systemic risks that emerge when multiple catastrophes interact, a form of analysis sometimes called scenario contagion modelling. His ability to move between deep mathematical formalism and genuinely intelligible public communication about risk makes him one of the most effective advocates for the actuarial approach to extreme events.

16. Saliya Jinadasa

Saliya Jinadasa is an actuary and researcher whose 2025 analysis of the California wildfires, published in Actuaries Digital, was among the most widely read actuarial pieces of that year, offering a systematic examination of the catastrophe risk, insurance availability, and reinsurance capacity implications of one of the most damaging wildfire sequences in recorded history. His work draws on deep experience in catastrophe risk modelling and insurance design across both Australian and international markets.

The California wildfire analysis engaged directly with the question that insurers and regulators are now confronting everywhere that climate change is accelerating loss frequency: whether the traditional model of private insurance as the primary vehicle for catastrophe protection is compatible with the physical reality of a warming planet. That question has no easy answer, but Jinadasa's contribution to putting it in front of the actuarial community with rigour and honesty was significant.

17. Tom van Denderen

Tom van Denderen is an actuary whose 2025 Actuaries Digital article on pet insurance tail risk was among the most downloaded actuarial pieces in Australia that year, for a reason that goes well beyond the novelty of the subject. His central argument, that insurance product designers systematically underweight catastrophic tail exposures because the average claim experience dominates their pricing, is a general argument about actuarial methodology dressed in an accessible case study.

The piece made a sophisticated point about how the actuarial instinct to build products around central tendency measures can leave policyholders exposed to the worst outcomes in exactly the situations where they most need protection. His willingness to apply rigorous actuarial thinking to a consumer-facing question in language that non-specialists can follow is a model for what actuarial thought leadership can look like when it reaches beyond professional boundaries.

18. Alexander Pui

Alexander Pui is an actuary and researcher whose 2025-26 work on flood risk in Vietnam, published in Actuaries Digital alongside Bruce Buckley, examined how a combination of climate change, rapid urbanisation, and infrastructure vulnerability is creating a catastrophic risk profile in one of the fastest-growing economies in the Asia-Pacific region. The paper used Bayesian inference and causal hypergraph methods to argue that conventional catastrophe modelling approaches based on logic trees systematically underestimate the probability of cascading climate failures.

That methodological argument, that linear models are inadequate for a non-linear world, is one of the most important debates in catastrophe actuarial work right now, and Pui's contribution to that debate through specific empirical work in an understudied geography gives his thought leadership a grounding that abstract methodology papers often lack.

19. Amy Kessler

Amy Kessler spent nearly three decades at Prudential Financial, where she became one of the most experienced practitioners in the global pension risk transfer market, advising pension funds on longevity risk transfers and bulk annuity transactions. Her work helped establish the intellectual and commercial framework for the pension risk transfer market as it operates today in the United States and internationally.

Her thought leadership addresses the intersection of longevity risk and investment risk in defined benefit pension funds, and she has been a consistent voice for the argument that the growth of the pension risk transfer market is fundamentally a social good: it moves risk away from corporates that are poorly positioned to bear it and toward insurers and reinsurers that have the capital, diversification, and actuarial expertise to manage it properly.

Category 4: Insurance Actuarial Innovation: Pricing, Reserving and AI

Insurance actuarial practice is being transformed faster than at any point in the profession's history, driven by the availability of granular data, the deployment of machine learning in pricing and reserving, and the arrival of AI tools capable of automating tasks that once required years of actuarial judgment to execute. The people in this category are doing the most credible and consequential work on how that transformation should be navigated: what it means to remain a rigorous actuarial thinker in an age of generative AI, and what new capabilities the profession needs to build before it can responsibly lead the AI adoption that is already under way in insurance.

20. Ronald Richman

Ronald Richman is a Fellow actuary and researcher at QED Actuaries and Consultants in South Africa and one of the most cited authors in the literature on artificial intelligence applications in actuarial science. His 2021 two-part paper in the Annals of Actuarial Science, "AI in actuarial science: a review of recent advances," provided a systematic survey of machine learning and deep learning applications across mortality modelling, claims reserving, non-life pricing, and telematics, and remains a primary reference point for actuaries engaging with AI methodology.

His work is distinctive because it occupies a space between academic research and professional practice: rigorous enough to contribute to the scholarly conversation, applied enough to translate into specific guidance for practitioners. His contribution to the profession's understanding of where AI adds genuine value in actuarial work, and where it introduces transparency and governance risks that actuaries must manage, is among the most practically important thought leadership currently being produced in the field.

21. Ioannis Kyriakou

Ioannis Kyriakou is Professor of Actuarial Finance and Director of the MSc Actuarial Programme Cluster at Bayes Business School, which ranked third globally among actuarial research institutions for publications in the four leading actuarial journals between 2021 and 2025, per the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's assessment. His research spans actuarial finance, insurance pricing, and computational methods for stochastic modelling, with particular focus on equity-linked insurance products and their hedging.

As programme director, he shapes the training of the next generation of actuaries at one of the world's leading actuarial schools, which gives his thought leadership an influence that extends well beyond publication. His public commentary on the implications of new financial mathematics for insurance product design is informed by direct engagement with both academic literature and commercial practice.

22. Geoff Atkins

Geoff Atkins is among the most respected practitioners in the history of Australian insurance reserving, and his 2025 Actuaries Digital essay, "The Aussie Advantage: How our actuaries pioneered insurance reserving," offered a reflective examination of the specific innovations that Australian actuaries contributed to the global development of general insurance reserving methodology. His thesis, that Australian reserving practice developed world-leading approaches partly because of the unique characteristics of Australian tort law and long-tail insurance liabilities, has been widely discussed within the profession.

His thought leadership continues to emphasise that actuarial judgment, contextual understanding, and communication remain central to reserving even as automation tools become more capable, and that the ability to explain and defend a reserving position to a board or regulator is at least as important as the technical accuracy of the estimate itself.

23. Mohamed Elsheemy

Mohamed Elsheemy is a Fellow of the IFoA with a background at the Bank of England and a current focus on the intersection of actuarial practice and emerging financial technology. He chairs the IFoA's Blockchain and Fintech Working Party, and his work in that role has been pivotal in exploring how blockchain-based mechanisms can transform the design and governance of traditional financial systems, including insurance and pension structures.

His thought leadership on the actuarial implications of decentralised finance and tokenised insurance is among the most technically grounded available from within the profession. His advocacy for actuaries engaging seriously with the DeFi ecosystem, rather than dismissing it as outside the profession's scope, has helped push the IFoA's technology agenda toward a more genuinely exploratory position.

24. Hugh Karp

Hugh Karp is the founder of Nexus Mutual, a blockchain-based mutual insurance platform that uses smart contracts and decentralised governance to offer coverage for smart contract failures, custody risks, and other Web3-native exposures, applying actuarial principles to an entirely new category of risk. Before founding Nexus Mutual, he worked in traditional actuarial practice in life insurance and reinsurance, which gives his entrepreneurial work a technical grounding that most blockchain insurance founders lack.

His contribution to actuarial thought leadership is the demonstration that the core actuarial concepts of risk pooling, adverse selection management, and solvency assurance can be implemented in decentralised protocols without requiring a traditional regulated carrier structure. Whether or not that model eventually achieves mass adoption, the intellectual work of showing how it could function is a genuine contribution to the profession's understanding of its own transferability.

25. Arthur Charpentier

Arthur Charpentier is a Professor at UQAM in Montreal and one of the most prolific researchers working at the boundary of actuarial science and data science. He is the editor and primary author of Computational Actuarial Science with R, one of the most widely used modern actuarial methodology texts, and he has published extensively on credibility theory, copula models, non-life insurance pricing, and the application of machine learning to actuarial problems.

His blog and public writing on actuarial methodology have built an audience far beyond the academic actuarial community, reaching data scientists and statisticians who encounter actuarial problems in insurance and risk management without having actuarial training. That crossover audience is precisely where the most interesting methodological conversations are happening as the boundaries between actuarial science, statistics, and machine learning continue to blur.

26. David Beddows

David Beddows is a senior pricing actuary at a global life and health reinsurer and the co-founder and Chair of the IFoA's Population Health Management Working Party. His 2025 IFoA "think" paper examined how the UK government's 10-Year Health Plan and its financial framework could support a culture of investing in prevention and population health management, an argument that connects actuarial modelling of health costs directly to public health policy design.

His thought leadership is particularly valuable because it occupies a space where actuarial expertise rarely ventures publicly: the design of health system incentives and the alignment of financial flows with prevention rather than treatment. His willingness to argue in policy terms, not just actuarial terms, about how health finance should be restructured is a model for how practitioners can extend their professional voice beyond technical actuarial questions.

Category 5: Risk Theory and Mathematical Foundations

The mathematical foundations of actuarial science are not merely academic. The concepts developed in risk theory, extreme value mathematics, copula models, and premium principles translate directly into how the industry prices risk, manages capital, and evaluates solvency. The researchers in this category have made contributions to the theoretical underpinning of the discipline that are in active use in commercial and regulatory practice around the world. Their work is the deep infrastructure of the profession. For a broader view of leading researchers at world-class institutions shaping the global risk conversation, visit 

For a broader view of leading risk voices, visit risk management thought leaders globally

27. Paul Embrechts

Paul Embrechts is Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich and co-author, with Claudia Klüppelberg and Thomas Mikosch, of Modelling Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance, one of the foundational texts of extreme value theory in an applied finance and actuarial context. That book provided the mathematical framework the industry uses to model the tails of loss distributions where the data is sparse and the consequences of underestimation are catastrophic.

His work on copula theory, risk aggregation, and the limitations of correlation as a dependence measure in the presence of extreme events has had direct and significant consequences for how Solvency II capital models are built and reviewed. The Basel III correlation matrix criticism, which became part of the regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis, reflected intellectual work that Embrechts and his collaborators had been publishing for years beforehand.

28. Jan Dhaene

Jan Dhaene is a Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium and one of the most influential contributors to the theory of comonotonicity and its applications in actuarial science. His research on optimal risk sharing, premium principles, and the mathematical properties of risk measures has shaped how the profession thinks about the aggregation of risks across portfolios and the design of insurance structures that allocate risk efficiently.

His recent work on decentralised risk sharing and tontine-like retirement products, published in the Annals of Actuarial Science, reflects his engagement with the applied questions that are reshaping retirement finance: how can risk-sharing arrangements be designed that are fairer, more sustainable, and more aligned with what retirees actually need than traditional life annuity products?

29. Michel Denuit

Michel Denuit is a Professor at UCLouvain in Belgium and a leading researcher on tontine-style retirement products, decentralised insurance, and the mathematics of risk sharing. His research programme has made a significant contribution to the theoretical question of how risk-sharing arrangements can be designed to produce outcomes that are both financially stable and equitable across cohorts with different longevity profiles.

His co-authored work on multi-period decentralised risk-sharing models, published in the Annals of Actuarial Science, extends the tontine concept beyond its historical form into mechanisms that can adapt dynamically to the actual experience of a cohort as it ages, rather than locking in assumptions at inception. That adaptability makes the designs more practical for real-world implementation.

30. Hansjörg Albrecher

Hansjörg Albrecher is a Professor at the University of Lausanne and a specialist in ruin theory, reinsurance mathematics, and stochastic models for insurance. The University of Lausanne ranks in the global top five for actuarial research output, and Albrecher has been among its most prolific contributors, publishing research on optimal reinsurance arrangements, dividend strategies for insurance companies, and the mathematical properties of extremal distributions.

His applied work on reinsurance optimisation addresses one of the most practically consequential questions in insurance mathematics: given a particular risk portfolio and a menu of reinsurance instruments, what combination of retention, quota share, and excess-of-loss arrangements produces the most efficient capital allocation? That question sits at the heart of how every major insurer manages its balance sheet.

31. Runhuan Feng

Runhuan Feng is a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of Technical Foundation of Business Models, published in the Springer Actuarial series in 2023. His research addresses the mathematical modelling of decentralised insurance, tontine products, and the actuarial foundations of sustainable retirement income structures, with an emphasis on products that can function without the full capital backing of a traditional regulated insurer.

His work is particularly relevant to the question of whether and how mutual aid and peer-to-peer insurance platforms can be designed to serve populations that traditional insurance markets have underserved, and whether the actuarial frameworks developed for regulated products can be adapted to govern decentralised risk-sharing arrangements that operate across jurisdictions and without traditional prudential oversight.

32. Steve Haberman

Steve Haberman is Professor Emeritus of Actuarial Science at Bayes Business School, where he spent most of his career building one of the most productive actuarial research groups in the world. He is a co-author of multiple actuarial textbooks that have been central to professional education for decades, and his research on mortality modelling, disability insurance, and the mathematical structure of life contingencies has been foundational to how the profession trains and develops its practitioners.

His influence is as much pedagogical as it is research-based: the generation of actuaries who have studied from textbooks he co-authored carry the mathematical frameworks he developed into practice every day, which gives his thought leadership an extraordinary reach that goes well beyond citation counts.

Category 6: Actuarial Health, Data and Technology

The expansion of actuarial work into health, data science, and technology represents one of the most significant transformations in the profession's history. Actuaries are increasingly working alongside engineers, data scientists, and clinicians to design health systems, price novel risks, and build the analytical infrastructure that modern insurers and healthcare organisations depend on. The people in this category are leading that expansion: they are building new methodologies, new institutional frameworks, and new forms of actuarial practice that did not exist a decade ago.

33. Mary Hardy

Mary Hardy is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo, one of the world's premier actuarial research universities, and she has been among the most productive actuarial researchers in the area of variable annuities, segregated funds, and equity-linked insurance products for the past three decades. Her research on the embedded guarantees in variable annuity products, and on the hedging and reserving approaches these products require, has been directly incorporated into regulatory frameworks in both Canada and the United States.

She has been a prolific contributor to the Society of Actuaries' research programs and has served the profession in a large number of editorial and committee roles. Her public communication on the risks embedded in variable annuity products, including direct engagement with regulatory consultations and public policy discussions, is a model for how academic actuarial researchers can translate technical findings into regulatory consequences.

34. Joey Zhou

Joey Zhou is an Associate Professor of Practice in Insurance, Actuarial Science, and Risk Management at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and his research spans retirement protection, life and health risks, and the intersection of climate risk and health outcomes. His career moved from industry roles across the insurance value chain into full-time academia, which gives his research a practical grounding that helps it connect with the commercial questions practitioners are actually trying to answer.

His current research focus on how actuaries can help retirees better understand their longevity risk tolerance, and how that understanding can inform the design of retirement products, represents one of the more interesting connections being made between actuarial science, behavioural economics, and retirement policy.

35. Andrés Villegas

Andrés Villegas is an Associate Professor in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at the University of New South Wales Australia, with expertise in mortality modelling, longevity risk management, and the application of optimisation methods to actuarial problems. His research on multi-population mortality models, which examine how mortality trends interact across different demographic groups and geographies, is among the most technically sophisticated work currently being done on the foundations of longevity risk pricing.

His work addresses a question that becomes more important as pension risk transfer transactions grow in scale: do the mortality models used to price and hedge bulk annuity transactions adequately capture the divergence in mortality trends between the specific populations being transferred and the broader populations from which those models were calibrated?

36. Jennifer Wang

Jennifer Wang is Associate Dean and Distinguished Chair Professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and serves on the board of both the American Risk and Insurance Association and the Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association. Her research spans insurance economics, risk management, and pension fund governance, with particular attention to the structural differences between Asian and Western approaches to retirement finance and risk transfer.

As a board member of two of the most important risk and insurance academic associations globally, she occupies a rare position of influence across both research and professional communities. Her work on the governance and investment management of pension funds in Taiwan and across Asia has contributed to the development of pension policy in a region where demographic ageing is creating some of the most acute retirement finance challenges in the world.

37. Jenny Segal

Jenny Segal is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries who has built a post-actuarial career that includes board roles, a portfolio of non-executive directorships, and the authorship of five books on leadership and professional life. She is currently Chief Investment Officer of Nesta Trust and an ambassador for the Diversity Project. Her transition from leading global sales teams at major financial institutions to a portfolio career grounded in culture, purpose, and professional development has made her one of the most distinctive voices at the intersection of actuarial training and leadership practice.

Her participation in the IFoA Risk Management Symposium as a speaker on creating cultures people want to work in reflects a recognition within the profession that technical rigour alone is insufficient, and that actuarial organisations need leaders who can build environments where talent stays, contributes, and grows. Her five books give her thought leadership a depth and reach that conference talks alone cannot provide.

38. Caroline Winchester

Caroline Winchester is a Council member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and one of the more active actuarial voices on LinkedIn, using the platform to connect the IFoA's research output and policy submissions with a broader professional audience. She contributed to the IFoA's "think" series, which was designed to provoke debate on topics ranging from digital insurance to biodiversity risk, and her engagement style on LinkedIn is a model for how actuarial practitioners can share technical commentary in a form that non-actuarial audiences can engage with.

Her focus on biodiversity loss, food system risks, and the planetary solvency question, the idea that the biophysical foundations of the global economy need to be assessed with the same rigour that actuaries apply to insurance balance sheets, places her at one of the most intellectually interesting frontiers of actuarial thought leadership currently available.

Category 7: Diversity, Global Reach and the Next Generation

The actuarial profession has historically been concentrated in a small number of wealthy anglophone countries and has underrepresented the regions that face the most acute actuarial challenges. The people in this category are doing the most consequential work on expanding who can become an actuary, where actuarial expertise is applied, and how the profession can grow its global footprint in a way that is genuinely additive rather than merely representational. Their work is as much about the future of the profession as the state of the discipline.

39. Yvonne Palm

Yvonne Palm is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and one of the three co-founders of the African Actuarial Development Academy, which was established to deepen actuarial capacity across the African continent. The AADA was created with the recognition that Africa's insurance markets are among the most underserved in the world, not because actuarial problems do not exist there but because the pipeline of credentialled actuarial talent has been too thin to support the scale of technical work the markets require.

Her thought leadership on actuarial capacity development in Africa goes beyond advocacy: the AADA is a practical institution that is building the educational and professional infrastructure to change the supply of actuarial expertise on the continent, and Palm's co-founding and leadership of it represents a commitment that many thought leaders discuss but few act on with the specificity and sustained effort she has demonstrated.

40. Mukami Njeru

Mukami Njeru is a co-founder of the African Actuarial Development Academy alongside Yvonne Palm and Yeside Kazeem, and her involvement in the AADA reflects the same analysis: that the most important constraint on the actuarial profession's impact in Africa is not the absence of actuarial problems but the absence of credentialled actuaries to work on them. Her work through the AADA addresses that constraint directly by creating new pathways to actuarial qualification and professional development for candidates who lack access to the traditional routes.

The significance of the AADA's work extends beyond the actuarial profession itself. Actuarial capacity is a precondition for sustainable insurance markets, and sustainable insurance markets are a precondition for private investment, climate adaptation finance, and social protection systems that can function at scale. Building that capacity in Africa is not a professional development project. It is an economic development project.

41. Yeside Kazeem

Yeside Kazeem is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and a Fellow of the Nigerian Actuarial Society and one of the three co-founders of the African Actuarial Development Academy. Her work on actuarial capacity development on the African continent is grounded in direct experience of the barriers that candidates from West Africa face in accessing actuarial qualification through the IFoA's traditional pathways, which were designed primarily for candidates in the UK and are not always well adapted to the examination environment, study resources, and professional support networks available in Lagos or Accra.

Her contribution is both advocacy and institution-building: pushing the IFoA to adapt its systems for African candidates while simultaneously building the AADA as an institution that can reduce the structural barriers from the demand side.

42. Kitty Chan

Kitty Chan is the Asia Liaison at the Actuaries Institute of Australia, responsible for strategic engagement across the Asia-Pacific region and for connecting the Institute's members with industry leaders, regulators, and professional partners across one of the most demographically complex and actuarially important regions in the world. She brings actuarial experience from Sydney and has lived and worked in Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which gives her a rare breadth of direct personal understanding of the diversity of actuarial environments across Asia.

Her work on bridging the Australian and Asian actuarial communities addresses a structural gap in the profession: the IFoA and the Actuaries Institute have different relationships with Asian actuarial bodies, and the practitioners who can navigate both are rare. Her thought leadership on professional development for actuaries working across Asian markets, including her 2026 article on CPD in the Year of the Fire Horse, is consistently practical and grounded in direct experience.

43. Les Mayhew

Les Mayhew is Professor of Statistics at Bayes Business School and Managing Director of Mayhew Harper Associates Ltd., a consultancy specialising in ageing, pensions, health, and social care policy. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Actuarial Profession and a former senior civil servant with nearly 20 years of experience across the UK government departments of Health, Social Security, and the Office for National Statistics.

His thought leadership is built on an unusual combination of academic rigour, policy experience, and international comparative work spanning Italy, Ukraine, Australia, Russia, Japan, and China. His research on ageing, housing for older people, and the social care financing gap occupies a space where actuarial thinking intersects with social policy in ways that are directly consequential for government spending decisions and insurance product design.

44. Martin Mulcare

Martin Mulcare is an Australian actuary who has served the Actuaries Institute through multiple volunteer roles and is currently conducting a significant oral history project, running a series of in-depth interviews with past presidents of the Actuaries Institute to capture the lessons, reflections, and leadership advice of the people who have shaped the profession in Australia over the past three decades. His 2025-26 interview series with Helen Rowell, who served as Actuaries Institute President in 2002 and subsequently as APRA Deputy Chair, was among the most engaged pieces of content the Institute published in the professional development space.

His contribution to preserving and communicating institutional memory in the actuarial profession serves an important function that is easy to overlook: the profession's future depends partly on its ability to transmit hard-won lessons from one generation to the next, and the informal knowledge of how to lead the profession well is not captured in technical standards or regulatory guidance.

Category 8: Practitioner Leaders: Consulting, Industry and Advocacy

The thought leaders in this category are doing their most important work at the coalface of commercial actuarial practice: in consulting firms, in industry leadership roles, and in the advocacy spaces where the profession's public voice is built. They are translating actuarial expertise into practical decisions about how insurance companies are run, how pension schemes are governed, and how the profession communicates its value to the world outside its own membership.

45. Stuart Turner

Stuart Turner is Chair of the Actuaries Institute's Professionalism Committee and one of the most active voices on the ethics and professional standards questions that are reshaping how actuaries are expected to conduct themselves in an era of AI-assisted decision-making, climate disclosure obligations, and expanding actuarial advisory roles. He led the plenary discussion at the 2025 Asia Pacific Ethics and Professionalism Seminar, addressing how actuaries navigate the increasingly complex boundary between technical advice, value judgements, and regulatory obligation.

His thought leadership on professionalism matters because the expansion of actuarial work into new domains, from cryptocurrency risk to biodiversity loss to algorithmic insurance pricing, is creating ethical challenges that the profession's existing codes of conduct were not designed to address. Actuaries who can think clearly about what professional responsibility means in these new contexts are among the profession's most valuable contributors.

46. Alissa Holz

Alissa Holz is Senior Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of RGA Reinsurance Australia and New Zealand, appointed in April 2025, with overall responsibility for RGA's operations in both countries including strategy, client engagement, and financial results. She joined RGA in 2006 and has held roles across both Australian and Asian markets over more than 25 years of life insurance industry experience.

Her thought leadership at the All Actuaries Summit 2026 addressed retirement income system design and how superannuation funds can genuinely empower Australians to thrive in retirement, not merely accumulate assets until the point of transition. Her perspective combines the deep product and reinsurance knowledge of someone who has spent a career in life insurance with the strategic orientation of a CEO who has to make those products function at scale.

47. Rhea Wessel

Rhea Wessel is an American writer and educator based near Frankfurt, Germany, with more than 25 years of experience writing for publications including The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and the author of Write Like a Thought Leader, published in 2022. Her 2025 article in The Actuary magazine, "Into the Spotlight: Actuaries as Thought Leaders," was one of the most widely discussed pieces of actuarial professional commentary that year, arguing that actuaries have both the analytical capability and the professional obligation to step into public discourse on the risks that will define the next century.

Her contribution to the actuarial profession is unusual: she is a communicator and educator working with actuaries, rather than an actuary herself, and her perspective on the gap between what actuaries know and what they share publicly is informed by decades of observing expert professionals who communicate ineffectively. Her call for actuaries to treat thought leadership as a professional responsibility, not an optional extra, reflects the urgency of the moment.

48. Ronnie Klein

Ronnie Klein is the Director of Global Aging at The Geneva Association, the world's leading insurance industry think tank for long-term research on strategic issues, and a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and member of the American Academy of Actuaries. The Geneva Association's Global Aging programme produces research on the intersection of demographic change, health systems, and insurance markets that informs the strategy of the world's largest insurers and reinsurers.

His role requires him to translate the implications of global demographic trends, which actuaries model in technical terms, into strategic language that insurance executives and policymakers can act on. The quality of the Geneva Association's output in the aging and retirement space reflects the value of having actuarial thinking applied to the most consequential long-run demographic challenges the insurance industry faces.

49. Scott Duncan

Scott Duncan is a Principal at Taylor Fry in Australia whose recent work on the Iran conflict and its implications for Australian general insurers, co-authored with colleagues at Taylor Fry in 2026, offered one of the most practically grounded actuarial analyses of a geopolitical event and its cascading implications for insurance markets. The paper traced the conflict through three distinct risk channels: energy and supply chain driven claims inflation, macro and financial market stress, and direct conflict-related exposures in specialty lines.

The willingness to apply systematic actuarial analysis to a rapidly evolving geopolitical situation, producing actionable guidance for insurers under genuine uncertainty rather than waiting for the situation to stabilise, is a demonstration of what actuarial thought leadership looks like when it is operating at its most practically useful.

50. Sarah Wood

Sarah Wood is a consultant at Taylor Fry and co-author of the Actuaries Institute's cyber dialogue paper on SME protection gaps, published in 2024 alongside Win-Li Toh and Michael Neary. The paper identified a widening protection gap for small and medium enterprises in Australia's cyber insurance market and offered specific recommendations for how insurers, brokers, and regulators could address the structural barriers that leave most Australian SMEs effectively uninsured against cyber risk.

Her work represents the kind of applied actuarial thought leadership that has the most direct policy consequence: not abstract research on model methodology but concrete analysis of a real protection gap, with specific recommendations for how it should be closed. The paper was cited by the Actuaries Institute in its pre-budget submissions to government and contributed directly to the policy conversation on mandatory cyber disclosure and SME insurance affordability.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Any list of 50 produces meaningful exclusions, and two patterns are worth naming. The first is the group of towering foundational contributors whose work is so established that it sits above the current conversation: Hans Bühlmann's credibility theory and Paul Embrechts' extreme value contributions are in the bloodstream of the discipline. Embrechts appears here because his influence remains actively live; Bühlmann's belongs to a slightly different category of historical foundation rather than current thought leadership.

The second group consists of practitioners whose work is extremely important within specific national markets but who have not yet achieved the international visibility that would make them clearly representative of global actuarial thought leadership: the community of Indian actuaries building the IAI's capacity, the Japanese actuarial bodies preparing to host ICA 2026, and the Latin American practitioners doing extraordinary work in inclusive insurance. That international breadth is emerging, and a list compiled in two to three years will look different from this one.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging With Actuarial Thought Leadership

Following only the loudest voices rather than the most rigorous ones. Actuarial thought leadership circulates in peer-reviewed journals, professional body publications, and conference proceedings more than on social media, because the profession has historically valued rigour over reach. The most important actuarial ideas are often found in places that require more effort to access than a LinkedIn scroll.

Treating technical actuarial work as inaccessible to non-actuaries. The best actuarial thought leaders in this list write in ways that practitioners in insurance, pensions, and financial services can follow, even without actuarial credentials. The failure mode is assuming you need qualifications before engaging with actuarial ideas. You do not. You need curiosity and the willingness to follow an argument.

Confusing actuarial practice with insurance company operational work. Actuarial thought leadership covers pension design, social security policy, pandemic preparedness, climate disclosure, and biodiversity risk. The people on this list are not primarily insurance company employees describing their day-to-day work. They are researchers and practitioners engaging with the most consequential risk questions of the next century.

Dismissing national or regional actuarial bodies as parochial. The Actuaries Institute of Australia, the IFoA, the SOA, the CAS, and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries are producing world-class thought leadership in collaboration with each other and with the broader global actuarial community. Their national focus reflects the specificity of their regulatory and market environments, not a limitation of their intellectual ambition.

Waiting for the profession to be fully transformed before engaging. AI, climate risk, decentralised insurance, and longevity finance are reshaping actuarial practice in real time. The thought leaders on this list are navigating that transformation as it happens, and the conversation they are having now is more valuable than a retrospective account of what they eventually concluded.

For leadership teams in insurance, pensions, and financial services who want to build the organisational culture and communication capability to engage effectively with these changes, Jonno White delivers executive team facilitation, keynote presentations, and Working Genius workshops. Hire Jonno White to facilitate your next strategic offsite. Email jonno@consultclarity.org

Implementation Guide: How to Engage With Actuarial Thought Leadership

Start with the professional bodies. The IFoA's "think" series, Actuaries Digital at the Actuaries Institute of Australia, The Actuary magazine, and the SOA's research programmes are the most consistent sources of current actuarial thought leadership, and they are all freely accessible online. A commitment to reading one or two pieces from these sources each week will build a meaningful understanding of where the profession is heading in twelve months.

Follow the conference programmes. The All Actuaries Summit, the IFoA GIRO Conference, the CAS Annual Meeting, and the SOA's ImpACT Conference each produce public summaries and in many cases recordings that are available to non-members. The ICA 2026 in Tokyo in November will bring together the global actuarial community at the highest level, and its public programme will map the most important research conversations happening in the field right now.

Read across disciplines. The most interesting actuarial thought leadership increasingly sits at the boundary with other fields: climate science, behavioural economics, data science, public health, and financial regulation. The people on this list who are most influential are often those who have maintained fluency in actuarial methods while building genuine literacy in the adjacent fields where their methods are being applied. Following their reading lists is often more instructive than following their output alone.

Engage with the research, not just the commentary. Several people on this list, including Moshe Milevsky, Andrew Cairns, and Paul Embrechts, make their research accessible in ways that non-actuarial readers can follow. The key papers in longevity risk modelling, extreme value theory, and decentralised insurance are not as impenetrable as they appear from outside the profession.

Build the leadership infrastructure your actuarial team needs. Book Jonno White to deliver a Working Genius workshop or executive offsite for your actuarial leadership team. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. For additional context on how retirement and pension actuaries are shaping the global conversation, visit our companion piece on pension and retirement fund thought leaders

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes someone an actuarial thought leader rather than simply a competent actuary?

An actuarial thought leader contributes ideas that advance the profession beyond the state of current practice, whether through published research, policy advocacy, institutional leadership, or the kind of public communication that brings actuarial thinking to audiences that would otherwise not encounter it. Competence alone is not thought leadership. Thought leadership requires a willingness to stake out a position, share a perspective, and engage with the challenge and disagreement that follows.

How has actuarial thought leadership changed in the past five years?

The most significant change is the acceleration of cross-disciplinary work. Climate risk, AI governance, decentralised finance, and population health management are all areas where actuarial thought leadership is now operating in active conversation with non-actuarial disciplines. The profession has historically been self-contained, but the most influential actuarial voices of 2025 and 2026 are those who are fluent in adjacent fields and able to translate between them.

Is actuarial thought leadership relevant to someone who is not an actuary?

Yes. The questions that actuarial thought leaders work on, how to fund long lives, how to price climate risk, how to design insurance markets that serve everyone, are questions that affect governments, businesses, and individuals. The technical vocabulary of the field is specialised, but the underlying arguments are accessible to anyone willing to engage with data-driven reasoning about uncertainty.

Which professional bodies produce the best actuarial thought leadership?

The IFoA's "think" series and research programme, the SOA's research institute output, the Actuaries Institute's Actuaries Digital platform, and the Casualty Actuarial Society's research library are all strong. The International Actuarial Association's publications, including its IAA Risk Book series, provide a global cross-sectional view. For insurance professionals in Australia and New Zealand, check out our companion directory of insurance thought leaders in Australia and New Zealand

How can actuaries build their own public thought leadership profile?

The SOA's October 2025 article "Into the Spotlight," written by Rhea Wessel (who appears on this list), remains one of the most practical guides available. Its core argument is that actuaries already possess ideas worth sharing, and that the professional obligation to communicate those ideas publicly is not optional. For risk and finance professionals looking to understand the broader ecosystem of voices shaping how the world thinks about risk, visit our list of risk management thought leaders globally

Final Thoughts

The actuarial profession is one of the most important intellectual communities in the world for the problems the world needs to solve. It is also one of the least well known outside its own membership. That gap between relevance and recognition is closing, partly because the profession itself is changing, becoming more public-facing, more geographically diverse, more willing to engage with the political and social dimensions of the technical questions it has always worked on, and partly because the world is noticing that the problems actuaries have always worked on are no longer background risks. They are foreground crises.

The fifty people on this list are among those closing that gap most purposefully. They are producing research that matters, building institutions that will outlast them, communicating ideas in ways that audiences beyond the profession can follow, and demonstrating that actuarial thought leadership is not a niche concern. It is a contribution to the most important risk conversations of the century.

For organisations looking to develop the leadership capability and team culture to engage effectively with the complexity these thought leaders are navigating, Jonno White delivers Working Genius facilitation sessions, executive team offsites, keynote presentations, and leadership coaching for financial services, insurance, and professional services organisations. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation about what that looks like for your team.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

DW Simpson, 2026 Market Trends in Actuarial Recruiting. World Economic Forum, Global Risk Report 2026. IFoA, Thematic Review Survey on Actuarial Involvement in Climate and Sustainability, 2025. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, global actuarial research rankings (cited in Bayes Business School news release, June 2026). SCOR, 2025 Actuarial Awards press release, December 2025.

Next Read

The actuarial profession operates at the intersection of risk, data, and finance in ways that overlap significantly with the broader field of risk management. Fifty of the most influential voices currently shaping how organisations think about enterprise risk, operational risk, and financial risk can be found at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-risk-management-globally