In Profile:
Dr Ian Duncan
Dr Ian Duncan made his name in the actuarial sciences, gaining a reputation for founding and selling analytics companies in the USA. He has worked as an adjunct professor at the University of California Santa Barbara since 2011 and, in 2020, graduated from Heriot-Watt University with a PhD in actuarial maths and statistics. In March 2025, he established the Professor Angus MacDonald Scholarship at Heriot-Watt in support of an actuarial sciences MSc student. We sat down with him to learn more.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Where are you from and what has your career been in?
I was born and grew up in South Africa and did my undergraduate degree there at Natal University. I left there for the University of Oxford, where I did a graduate degree in economics. After graduating, I started working for an insurance company in London, which is now Aviva.
I eventually left because I wanted to come to North America. I lived in Canada for a while before being transferred to the USA. I worked in consulting for a company that became PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and then started a healthcare analytics company with a colleague. After we sold that I started another one, sold that, and came to UC Santa Barbara. I started and sold a few more companies, and now have a small company that I use for consulting and investment purposes.
What motivated your decision to found your first healthcare analytics company?
My consulting work happened to coincide with the development of big data and big databases in the mid-1990s. Healthcare of course has huge databases but back then all the analytics were done on mainframe computers, which were very slow and cumbersome. With the development of personal computers and the availability of large data, it became possible to do predictive analytics. There's an enormous market—as I discovered—for models that predict patient health risk, and it just so happened that it became possible to do that kind of work just as I was getting involved.
You graduated with a PhD in actuarial maths and statistics from Heriot-Watt University in 2020. What made you want to do a PhD at that point in your career and what do you think you've gained from it?
I like to finish things! I’d started but not completed a doctorate at Oxford, so a PhD always felt like an unfinished thing. My Heriot-Watt PhD has proven extremely valuable—I do a lot of expert testimony work, for which it’s extraordinarily helpful to have a PhD.
I think one of the enormous advantages of Heriot-Watt is its willingness to take on international students on a part-time and remote basis. It's almost impossible in the USA to find anything like Heriot-Watt's flexibility.
“I think one of the enormous advantages of Heriot-Watt is its willingness to take on international students on a part-time and remote basis.”
Dr Ian Duncan
What motivated you to support Heriot-Watt and the Actuarial Department philanthropically, and what do you hope that your support achieves?
When I sold one of my companies, I ended up with some money and a potentially large tax bill, so I gave some money to University of California for a chair in actuarial science, both for the tax write-off and because I wanted to promote actuarial science in our department.
However, I felt great gratitude for Heriot-Watt for taking me on as a student. Angus MacDonald, my supervisor, is a very fine researcher and very well respected in the actuarial profession. I really wanted to say thank you to Heriot-Watt and to Angus, so I made a contribution. I hope that it will help somebody to pursue their actuarial career.
As someone who has recently been on both sides of the educational divide—you’re a lecturer and were recently a PhD student—how do you think the student experience has changed?
I was fortunate—I entered my undergraduate studies in the late 1960s when universities were a lot cheaper, so I had a very good undergraduate education and then I was able to afford to go to Oxford for two years. Today, universities have become—and this is not good for them—very expensive places.
I think what we're seeing as a consequence is a questioning of the value of university education relative to what it costs. I wonder whether we might be going into a period where students take courses that are interesting to them or that might help them with their careers, but don't necessarily enrol in a formal degree-length programme. I think that this more sporadic sort of education is something that we need to figure out how to do better. Heriot-Watt, with its long tradition as a Mechanics Institute and educator of remote workers, seems well placed to capitalise on this need.
You named your scholarship after the recently retired Professor Angus MacDonald. Why did you name your scholarship after him?
Angus was the first person I spoke to at Heriot-Watt about doing a PhD and he ultimately became my supervisor. I would say, as a non-Scot, that he seems to me the quintessential Scot. But one comes to love one’s supervisor, I think, because you have a long relationship with them. Angus was especially good at pointing out bits of the literature that I was unfamiliar with to go off and read. Of course, I didn't spend nearly as much time with him as I would have if I'd been a permanent student on campus, but it's out of respect for what he's done and written, what he meant to me, that I used his name. With a little bit of arm twisting, he agreed!
Thanks Ian!
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The American Friends of Heriot-Watt University is a 501(c)3 registered organisation that allows alumni and friends of the University in the USA to benefit from tax deductions on their charitable donations.
