Leah Jager

Leah Jager was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her dad was a college mathematics professor and her mom taught middle-school math and English. From a young age, she liked playing school and hoped to someday be a professor like her dad.

In college, Jager majored in math and chemistry with the goal of attending graduate school in one of these fields. While she enjoyed her chemistry classes, she was less adept with lab work and decided she would pursue a graduate degree in a mathematical field.

Jager’s first encounter with statistics occurred during a summer internship in a food lab within the R&D division at Amway Corporation. The goal of her summer project was to improve the taste of a beverage using varying concentrations of a flavor additive. To determine whether the additive improved the drink’s taste, she ran taste tests on other interns and employees and analyzed the data using simple statistical tests. She never succeeded in making the drink taste any better, but she did become interested in statistics.

In graduate school, Jager completed a dissertation in a theoretical area of statistics, but after starting a faculty job in a math department at an undergraduate institution, she realized collaborative applied work was a better fit for her. Eventually leaving that job, she settled into a position that gave her roughly a 50-50 balance of applied collaborative/consulting work and teaching. This balance was the right fit for her—the consulting experiences enhanced her teaching by providing real-world examples to share with her students and the teaching enhanced her applied work since she often had to explain concepts to consulting clients without much statistical expertise.

Jager has taught statistics and biostatistics for more than 15 years. She is inspired when she sees a student realize the relevance statistics has in their life by connecting the material they see in class to something they’ve read online, to a project they’ve been working on, or to work they might do in the future.