Expertise

Evidence and epidemiology. Trained as a clinical epidemiologist, I bring a disciplined approach to what evidence can and cannot support, helping organsiations make better decisions by clarifying what the evidence says (and doesn’t say). This underpins everything else here.

Insurance medicine and risk. Advising insurers and reinsurers on mortality, morbidity, disability, longevity and lapse, so that medical assumptions and product features hold together within pricing, underwriting, and claims management.

Product and portfolio sustainability. Thematic reviews of disability and critical illness products through periods of market stress, and contribution to industry reform of disclosure, claims governance and policyholder expectations, with experience taking findings into supervisory and board settings.

Mental health in underwriting and claims. A long-standing focus on the interaction between psychiatric epidemiology and insurance decisions: claims volatility, diagnostic validity, and the evidence base for mental health underwriting.

Independent assessment and expert opinion. Impairment assessment, fitness for duty, work capacity and return to work assessment, causation and prognosis determination, and expert opinion in contested matters, grounded in occupational and environmental medicine.

Applied data and artificial intelligence. From biosttatistics to underwriting analytics and portfolio dashboards to the deployment of AI in claims and underwriting. The interest is practical: what changes the quality of decisions, and how such systems should be governed.

Genomics and precision medicine. The rate of development in this field is breathtaking and translating the advancements into potential insurance medicine impacts has been a focus of my work in recent years, especially in the context of regulatory developments.

Current interests

The actuarial evidence base for mental health underwriting; population research on insured lives; the limits of psychiatric nosology as a basis for risk classification; genomic medicine and its implications for insurance; and the governance of AI-assisted decisions.