Jennifer Jester, PhD

Jennifer M. Jester earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Jester joined the U-M School of Social Work in 2024 and is an Associate Research Scientist. where her research centers on community based participatory research, including evaluation of sexual violence prevention interventions with Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people and research to improve lives for Black and Brown LGBTQ+ individuals. In addition, she is a LEO adjunct lecturer, teaching Introduction to Statistics in the Social Work and Social Welfare Ph.D. program.

She has a joint appointment as an Associate Research Scientist at Zero to Thrive in the U-M Department of Psychiatry. In this role, she has evaluated the effects of interventions for young children and families using linear mixed modeling, survival analysis and Bayesian analysis. She has also provided statistical expertise to researchers in the U-M School of Social Work’s Treatment Innovation and Dissemination Research Group.

Throughout her career, Jennie studied various aspects of the development of children of alcoholic men and alcoholism in adults. Methodologies employed in publications from this work included latent trajectory class analysis, latent growth modeling, measurement invariance and structural equation modeling. During this time, she wrote the statistical analytic approach for six grants, which produced $15 million in funding.