Description: Just as the U.S. is dealing with a new surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations and death, the pandemic’s impact on the nation’s mortality rate is generating heightened interest. Two new reports issued from the Society of Actuaries provide important insights.

Description: As the size of the life reinsurance market in Bermuda has grown to over half a trillion dollars at the end of 2021, more and more actuaries are getting involved with this 21 square mile North Atlantic island in one way or the other. Come explore a fundamental understanding of the Bermuda solvency framework and an overview of its upcoming changes.

Description: Valerie Tsang and Jessica Kirkwood are both senior consultants with Ernst & Young LLP (EY UK) and Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) respectively, who also have something else in common—they both have recently moved to a new country and are now immersed in a different market. Here, they discuss the quick-changing landscape of actuarial work and regulations and the importance of being aware of the key issues both in the countries they work in and globally, as well as some of the differences they have seen between the UK and US markets.

Description: Our understanding of the biology of aging is increasing rapidly, creating insight into how and why any organism is aging. Some of the mechanisms by which the process of aging occurs in mammals are sufficiently well understood that clinical trials targeting them in humans to improve later life health and longevity are now being undertaken. Translating results seen in mammals to humans has the potential to increase life expectancy far beyond what we have seen historically. Come explore the current state and outlook of research.

Description: "Demographic components of Future Potential Old-Age Support Ratios – Kirill Andreev, Ph.D., United Nations, Population Division, New York, Mila Andreeva, KAMA Consulting Effect of internal Migration on the Health of Taiwan’s Elderly People – Jack C. Yue, Ph.D., – National Chengchi University, Department of Statistics, Taipei, TaiwanPopulation Aging and Canada’s Social Contract: Covid-19 Catalyst for Change – Douglas Andrews, FSA, FCIA, Ph.D., Lori J. Curtis, Ph.D., – University of Waterloo"

Description: "Establishing Methods for Annual Updates to Cohort Life Expectancies – R. Dale Hall, FSA, CERA, MAAAManaging Director of Research, Society of Actuaries Research Institute Longevity Disparity across Communities in the United States – Lijia Guo, Ph.D., ASA, MAAA , US Government Accountability Office, Applied Research and Methods Division, Washington DC"

Description: Both the SOA and AARP will showcase their recent research projects highlighting the impact of marginalization on aging and retirement. Learn how being a member of a marginalized group changes your outcomes as well as your perspective on aging and retirement.

Description: Dive into an integrative approach to Precision Medicine - how our modern capacity to interrogate a disease heterogeneity (from omics and phenotyping) and parallel advances in 'big data' together are driving to transform the practice of traditional medicine to precision medicine. After defining the relevant terminologies and the components of precision medicine, the speaker will walk through the spectrum in precision medicine and how it leads to personalized management of disease, which can impact underwriting approaches, product development and pricing. Diabetes will be used as a specific example.

Description: Mortality Model Selection and Combination in RAlternative approaches for selecting mortality models and forecasting mortality have been proposed. The usual practice is to base mortality forecasts on a single mortality model selected using in-sample goodness-of-fit measures. However, cross-validation and other alternative out-of-sample measures are increasingly being used in model selection, and model combination methods are becoming a common alternative to using a single mortality model. Such methods combine predictions from multiple mortality models to reduce model choice uncertainty and improve forecast accuracy. Explore techniques to select and combine mortality models using the freely available open source R package CoMoMo (https://github.com/kessysalvatory/CoMoMo), which extends the widely used R package StMoMo (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=StMoMo). We will use data for the USA and other countries to discuss and demonstrate four different model combination approaches including simple model averaging, Bayesian model averaging, model confidence set, and stacked regression ensembles.

Description: "Living to 100 in the time of COVID-19: A Study of Late –Life Mortality Trajectories, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D., Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D., Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago Swedish Mortality Does Not Decelerate in Recent Cohorts, or Does it? – Roland Rau, Ph. D., Professor, University of Rostock & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Marcus Ebeling, Ph.D., Karin Modig, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anders Ahlbom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm Sweden; Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, Ad Res Advanced Reinsurance Services GmbH, Cologne, Germany; Annika Ziegler, Lukas Stake, Hochschule Koblenz & Ad Res, Germany"