PhD Actuarial Science

An Integrated PhD provides a route into research study if you do not have a Masters degree, or have very little research training. It enables you to spend your first year completing a Masters-level qualification, followed by a full-time PhD studied over three to four years. We also offer a ‘standard' PhD in this subject which can be studied either full-time (three to four years) or part-time (six to seven years).

Actuaries provide assessments of financial security systems, with a focus on their complexity, their mathematics, and their mechanisms. Actuaries quantify the probability and manage the risk of future events in areas such as insurance, healthcare, pensions, investment, and banking and also in non-financial areas.

The first year of our Integrated PhD Actuarial Science is based on the syllabus of the majority of the Core Technical subjects of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, so you cover Core Technical subjects as part of your course (CT2 or CT3, depending on the optional module selected, CT4, CT5, CT6, and CT8). This focus on up-to-date research findings in actuarial methodologies and actuarial applications means that you gain a solid training in actuarial modelling and actuarial analysis.

In your second year, you move into the PhD element of the course. We have staff members available to act as supervisors across a number of areas, such as:

• survival analysis
• forensic economics
• risk management
• Islamic finance and takaful
• asset-liability management for pension funds
• predictability of financial time series
• and performance evaluation of funds

You are also invited to contact our School to discuss other potential research areas.

All University of Essex research students have access to our innovative and unique scheme, Proficio. Postgraduate research students are automatically enrolled on Proficio, which provides a variety of training courses, and a fund of up to £2,500 per student for conference attendance and relevant external training courses.