Doctor of Philosophy - Actuarial Science (Integrated)

An Integrated PhD provides a route into research study if students do not have a Masters degree, or have very little research training. It enables them to spend their first year completing a Masters-level qualification, followed by a full-time PhD studied over 3-4 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 students will cover Core Technical subjects as part of their 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 students wull gain a solid training in actuarial modelling and actuarial analysis.

In their second year, students move into the PhD element of the course. University of Essex has 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.