David is also an Honorary Visiting Professor and Research Consultant at the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, having been an Honorary Visiting Professor for some years and having been a part-time Professor in the Department from 1980 to 1985.

David Wilkie was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1955. After obtaining his pilot's 'wings' during National Service he joined the Scottish Widows' Fund in Edinburgh, where he qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in 1959 and as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 1960.

During his career David has worked for a number of life insurance companies, including Scottish Widows' in Edinburgh, Allianz Lebensversicherung in Stuttgart, Swiss Reinsurance Company in Zurich and Standard Life in Edinburgh. From 1985 to 1996 he was a partner of R Watson & Sons, consulting actuaries (now Watson Wyatt Partners), and from 1996 to 1999 he was a part-time consultant with Watson Wyatt.

He has always been active in his professional bodies, having served on the Councils of the Faculty of Actuaries (Vice President 1991-94), the Royal Statistical Society (Vice-President 1989-90), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications , and the Institute of Actuaries (Vice-President 1996-98). He was for 30 years a member of the Executive Committee of the Continuous Mortality Investigation Bureau, as Chairman for eleven of those years. He was also heavily involved over the years with what are now the FTSE Actuaries Indices, in particular with the Fixed Interest Indices.

Jointly with Dr Andrew Cairns of Heriot-Watt University he has constructed a Data Base of prices and other details of British Government Securities, which is publicly available for research use.

From 1979 to 1995 he was a representative of the Faculty of Actuaries on the Groupe Consultatif des Associations des Actuaires des Pays des Communautées Européennes, and served as Chairman of the Financial Committee of the Groupe from 1995 to 1998.

He has served on the Financial Institutions Group of the Department of the Environment (1981-82) and was a member of the Foresight Panel for Financial Services (1995-1999).

He was for many years a member of the Executive Committee of the Continuous Mortality Investigation Bureau of the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries, being Chairman from 1983 to 1994.  He is responsible for having constructed many of the mortality tables in current use by life offices, and also in developing, with others, a modern model for Income Protection Insurance (formerly PHI).  He is still a member of the CMI's IP Committee.  He was also a member of the AIDS Working Party of the Institute of Actuaries and developed the model for the spread of AIDS for use by life offices in the 1980s.  On the same demographic/insurance theme, since 2001 he has been a Member of the Genetics and Insurance Committee of the U.K. Department of Health.

David is best known, however, for his very many papers on actuarial subjects, especially those relating to what is now known as the 'Wilkie model', a stochastic model for describing the behaviour of investments (and also inflation, wages and exchange rates) based on autoregressive features, and suitable for long-term modelling, as opposed to the 'random walk' type of model, which may be adequate for short-term modelling.

He has been involved, as Chairman or Member of the relevant Scientific Committee, with organising the programmes of many international actuarial conferences, including the 2nd, 8th, 10th and 16th International AFIR Colloquia (Brighton 1991 - Chairman of the Scientific Committee; Cambridge 1998 - Chairman of the Colloquium Committee; Tromsø 2000 - Member of the Scientific Committee, and Stockholm 2007 - Member of the Scientific Committee), three Conferences of the International Association of Consulting Actuaries (Munich 1988, Vancouver 1992 and Hong Kong 1994) and the 26th International Congress of Actuaries, which took place in Birmingham, England, in June 1998.

He has been a Co-Editor of ASTIN Bulletin and an Associate Editor of British Actuarial Journal, and he is currently on the Editorial Advisory Committee of South African Actuarial Journal.

David has been honoured with gold medals both by the Faculty of Actuaries (1992) and by the Institute of Actuaries (1995).

He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by City University, London, in 1994, an Honorary Doctorate of Mathematics by Waterloo University, Canada, in 2002, and an Honorary Doctorate of Science by Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 2005.  He has been elected an Honorary or Corresponding Member of the Swiss, Italian, Swedish and South African Actuarial Societies.  He was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1998.

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