Jessica Utts

Jessica Utts (born 1952) is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine, where she was chair of the Department of Statistics, and previously was a faculty member at the University of California, Davis. She is known for her textbooks on statistics, her work in statistics education, and her involvement in statistical evaluations of remote viewing and other parapsychology research.

Early life and education Utts entered the State University of New York at Binghamton at age 17 and initially planned to major in mathematics. During her sophomore year she added psychology as a second major, and in her junior year took courses in statistics and mathematical models in psychology that led her toward statistics as a field combining the two interests.

Career After completing her doctorate, Utts joined the University of California, Davis. She has described choosing Davis because the campus was organizing a new statistics department; after spending her first year in the mathematics department, she became one of the founding members of the UC Davis statistics unit.

Statistics education Utts has written extensively about what non-specialists should learn from introductory statistics. In a 2003 article in The American Statistician, she argued that college statistics courses should give greater attention to interpreting statistical information in scientific studies and public reporting, including issues such as the distinction between correlation and causation.

Her textbook Seeing Through Statistics was written for students whose main need was to become informed consumers of statistical information rather than technical producers of statistical analyses. In the 2014 Journal of Statistics Education interview, Utts said the book grew out of her view that a first statistics course should emphasize ideas that students could use in daily life and in their careers.

Utts concluded that the program's statistical results supported the existence of psychic functioning. Hyman agreed that statistically significant effects appeared in the data but argued that Utts's conclusion was premature, emphasizing possible methodological problems and lack of independent replication. The project was terminated in 1995 after reviewers concluded that remote viewing had not been shown to be useful for intelligence operations. Critics including David Marks have also argued that Utts's prior publications with remote-viewing researcher Edwin May raised questions about her independence as an evaluator.

Awards and honors Utts is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2009 she received the ASA Founders Award, which recognizes distinguished service to the association. She received the Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award from the ASA in 2022.

Selected publications Books

Papers