During his last 2 years at Princes, Richard Jarrett's maths teacher was Mr 'Jimmy' Duff, whose humility, respect for others and deep interest in mathematics were an inspiration. Studies at Adelaide University were followed by a scholarship to do a PhD at Imperial College, London. On returning to Australia, he worked for the CSIRO and Melbourne University, then for 9 years as Professor of Statistics at Adelaide University, where he taught students in mathematics, science and engineering.
He describes his role as a CSIRO statistician as a 'problem solver who uses data to get to the heart of a problem'. For example, an extrusion process turns large rolls of rubber into windscreen wipers- why does it produce so many defective parts? The solution required identifying the key issues with a team of scientists and engineers, running experiments, then analysing and interpreting the data to uncover the causes. Richard considers the fun of being a statistician is to work with teams to solve a variety of challenging problems.