Jennifer Gillespie to Lead Society of Actuaries

What You Need to Know

The society represents about 31,000 actuaries worldwide, including about 20,000 in the U.S.
Gillespie is vice president of actuarial services at Consortium Health Plans; before that, she was a Blue Cross Blue Shield actuary.
Retired Minnesota regulator John Robinson will become the group's president-elect.

Jennifer Gillespie is preparing to take over later this month as the president of the Society of Actuaries.

Actuaries are people who have taken tests showing that they understand the statistics and other math behind life insurance policies, annuities, pensions, and other arrangements that involve estimates of how likely bad things are to happen as well as assumptions about other types of risk.

The SOA, based in Schaumburg, Illinois, represents about 31,000 actuaries around the world, including about 20,000 actuaries in the United States. One of its missions is to help actuaries compete with data scientists, or people who have taken statistics classes but who do not necessarily have the same kind of familiarity with mortality, morbidity, longevity or casualty risk that actuaries have.

Gillespie is vice president of actuarial services at Consortium Health Plans, an organization that helps Blue Cross and Blue Shield carriers sell big, national account health plans to large employers.

From 1996 through 2014, she worked as an actuary at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

She has a bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College.

The President-Elect

When Gillespie becomes the SOA’s president, John Robinson will become the group’s president-elect.

Robinson recently retired from a post as an actuary with the Minnesota Department of Commerce, where he reviewed life insurance and annuity product filings.

From 2010 through 2013, he was president of the International Association of Black Actuaries.

Robinson has a bachelor’s degree in math from the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica; a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Delaware; and a master’s degree in statistics from Florida State University.