Today's guest is Jennifer Rogers, a statistician specialising in all things medical.

In addition to her consultancy job, she's well known in the UK as someone who tries to increase

public awareness and understanding of statistics. Now in a world of coronavirus and vaccinations,

there can hardly be a better time to be talking to her.

But before we get to COVID and clinical trials, I asked Professor Rogers a bit about her own statistical journey.

People who do the sort of things you do for a living, I like to find out what they were like

when they were kids. Like, were you, as a girl, were you into stats and numbers and that?

Were you always going to be a statistician? Do you know what? I actually was convinced that I was

no good at maths. And at school, I really wasn't the biggest maths fan. It was my maths teacher who actually

talked me in to do an A level in it. And it was really then when I did my A level, so sort of

college level, that I really fell in love with mathematics. And particularly that was the first time that I was ever really

properly introduced to statistics and I really loved the application of mathematics and I loved the fact

that you could see a data set, you could plot it, you could mess around with it and that was then I really fell in love with mathematics and then decided to take it on

further into university and always convinced that this was it, the last one, I'm not doing

anything else after, and then ended up doing more and more and more.

Why didn't you like mathematics?

Was it because you weren't good at her or was it because it wasn't cool and what the cool kids did? Like, why weren't you into it at first? I think I potentially hadn't found my bit of maths that I loved. And I'm a bit of a perfectionist and if I'm not the best at something, I'm convinced then that

I'm really bad at it.

You know, it has to be all or nothing type of thing.

And I think that when it came to some of the more, you know, trigonometry kind of subjects,

there were people in the class who were better than me at it and I think I just then thought

oh that means I'm rubbish and I'm no good at this and I you know when I really found statistics I got

...