Open to roles starting January 2027

I’m Jacob, a statistician who helps people make better decisions with data.

See my work → Get in touch
Work 03
Consulting

Statistical Consulting

Study design and analysis for researchers and organizations. Through Virginia Tech’s Statistical Applications & Innovations Group I work with roughly ten clients, from a water-quality lab to a veterinary researcher, and teach a short course on unsupervised learning. Before that I coauthored a community needs assessment for Semcac.

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Spatial statistics

Spatial and Temporal Models for Human Trafficking

Trafficking counts are mostly zeros, with a few localized spikes and heavy under-reporting. I combine FBI incident data with American Community Survey and refugee resettlement records, and build Bayesian models that find hotspots without smoothing them away.

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Compositional data

Compositional Data Analysis

I co-authored a review of open problems in high-dimensional compositional data analysis, writing the sections on transformations, regression, and model evaluation. Separately, I led the analysis for a study of river bacteria as bioindicators of watershed land cover.

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About

I’m finishing my M.S. in Statistics at Virginia Tech, where I hold the Jean D. Gibbons Fellowship, and I graduate in December 2026. Before that I earned my B.S. in Statistics at Winona State University as a Distinguished Graduate, with minors in Data Science and Mathematics.

Most of my work starts with someone else’s question. At Virginia Tech’s Statistical Applications & Innovations Group I help researchers design studies and analyze their data, and before graduate school I coauthored a community needs assessment for Semcac across seven Minnesota counties. In industry I built models and data tools at Fastenal and Marine Credit Union.

My own research is on counts that are sparse, spatially clustered, and under-reported, with human trafficking as the main application. I also co-authored a review of high-dimensional compositional data analysis, and I led the analysis for a study of river bacteria as bioindicators of watershed land cover.

I’m open to roles starting January 2027, wherever the goal is a better decision made with data.

Publications 04
2024Published
Comparison of Yamuna (India) and Mississippi River (United States of America) bacterial communities reveals greater diversity below the Yamunotri Glacier
Martinez, O., Bergen, S., & Gareis, J.
PLOS ONE · 19(7): e0304664
View paper ↗
Published
2026Submitted
Open Problems in High-Dimensional Compositional Data Analysis
Gareis, J., Keglovitz, C., Schwob, M., & Datta, J.
Manuscript submitted and awaiting review · Working draft (PDF)
Read the draft ↗
Submitted
2026Submitted
Bacterial Community Fingerprints as Bioindicators of Watershed Land Cover
Gareis, J., Martinez, O., Bergen, S., Blumentritt, D., & Olsen, C.
Manuscript submitted and awaiting review · Preprint (PDF)
Read the preprint ↗
Submitted
2026In revision
Personality Trait–Driven Vulnerabilities to Anxiety and Social Media Addiction in Adolescent Females
Cristadoro, K., Hooks, T., & Gareis, J.
Awaiting revisions from co-authors
In revision
Experience

Professional

Statistical Consultant
Virginia Tech · Statistical Applications & Innovations Group
May 2026 – Present
  • Serve roughly ten clients in formal collaborations, plus recurring one-off consultations on study design and analysis, with contributions acknowledged in resulting publications.
  • Developed a 2.5-hour short course on unsupervised learning in R and Python, offered through SAIG in person and online.
  • Partnered with the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory to analyze chemical concentrations in water samples and design experiments that quantify sources of measurement variability.
  • Built time-to-event models with a veterinary researcher to estimate when calves progress to disease requiring antibiotics, and identified additional diagnostics predictive of pneumonia onset and progression.
Solutions Analyst
Fastenal
Aug 2024 – Jun 2025
  • Built an LLM and machine learning pipeline that classified recurring ServiceNow ticket requests, adapted template SQL scripts, and returned results through the ServiceNow API after analyst approval.
  • Developed a stock-restock optimization algorithm that forecasts demand from historical trends, seasonality, and holiday effects to minimize downtime.
  • Unified previously disparate databases with SQL and built Power BI dashboards for self-service reporting.
Statistical Consultant
Semcac
Aug 2023 – Dec 2024
  • Coauthored Semcac’s 2024 Community Needs Assessment, a 100-page report that helps set strategy and resource allocation across a three-year planning cycle.
  • Designed and administered a survey across the seven Minnesota counties Semcac serves, and combined the responses with American Community Survey data in R and Excel.
  • Compared need against existing program coverage county by county to show where programs matched demand and where needs went unmet.
Data Analyst Intern
Marine Credit Union
Jan 2024 – Jun 2024
  • Helped develop a next-best-action system that uses member information at the time of in-branch service to recommend which product, service, or support a teller should offer.
  • Modeled probability of loan default to identify members who may need additional support, and built propensity models for product offerings.
  • Built and maintained Power BI dashboards and internal reporting for the finance and human resources teams.
IT Analyst Intern
Marine Credit Union
Aug 2023 – Dec 2023
  • Supported fraud investigations by retrieving surveillance footage, coordinated vendor technicians through recurring system failures, and served on the committee that selected a replacement system.
  • Audited internal password security with Hashcat and followed up with employees to bring weak passwords into compliance.
  • Coordinated a company-wide rollout of new photo identification badges, from design and printing to access credentialing.

Research

Researcher
Virginia Tech · Department of Statistics
Sep 2025 – Present
  • Lead research modeling human trafficking counts in the U.S., combining FBI NIBRS incident data, American Community Survey covariates, and Office of Refugee Resettlement unaccompanied children records.
  • Develop Bayesian spatiotemporal models in R for quasi-sparse count data, using global-local shrinkage priors to detect localized hotspots without oversmoothing.
  • Authored the transformations, compositional modeling, and model evaluation sections of a review of high-dimensional compositional data analysis.
Researcher
Winona State University · Biology Department
Sep 2023 – Present
  • Conducted the analysis and produced a manuscript identifying five bacterial community types across eleven Yamuna and Mississippi River sites with k-means clustering, using SIMPER to find the 29 taxa that separate them.
  • Correlated those taxa against eight land-cover classes at three nested spatial scales, controlling the false discovery rate, and found that watershed-scale land cover tracks community composition more closely than local land cover.
  • Assisted in delineating upstream watersheds in ArcGIS from HydroSHEDS elevation data and deriving Sentinel-2 land-cover composition at three nested buffer sizes.
  • Assisted with the analysis and writing of a published comparison of bacterial diversity across the two river systems, using PCA, Shannon and Simpson diversity indices, and ANOVA with Tukey HSD.
Summer Researcher
Southern Methodist University
Summer 2024
  • Built a Python Dash application that narrows the search area for agricultural labor trafficking sites, turning a survivor’s escape location, travel time, and reported crop into a map of candidate farms from CroplandCROS imagery and OpenStreetMap road data.
  • Refined the tool with feedback from contacts at the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Homeland Security North Texas Trafficking Task Force.
  • Placed second among forty presenters at the program’s summer symposium, and the application remains in use by SMU’s Human Trafficking Data Research team.
Contact

Let’s talk.

I graduate in December 2026 and I’m open to roles starting January 2027. If you have a question that needs a statistician, or you just want to talk shop, send me a note.

Emailjacobgareis22@gmail.com↗ LinkedIn/in/jacob-gareis↗ GitHub@JacBGar↗ CVDownload CV (PDF)↗