Drawing on a strong educational background and decades in academia, Professor Milo Schield is an intellectual entrepreneur in statistical education having spent over 25 years researching, developing, advocating and promoting statistical literacy as a new course and a new discipline.  In 1999, he created a statistical literacy course for general education at Augsburg College.  In 2001, he was the Principal Investigator on a $500K grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation “to develop statistical literacy as an interdisciplinary curriculum in the liberal arts.” In 2003, he self-published the first edition of his textbook, Statistical Literacy: seeing the story behind the statistics, he created his statistical literacy website, www.StatLit.org, and he was named the “leader of the statistical literacy movement” by Dr. Joel Best in his book: More Damned Lies and Statistics.’ 

Growing up in Iowa, Dr. Schield attributes much of his success to his father and uncle, both farmers, who created a small machine for digging dirt—which ultimately propelled them to become the world’s largest manufacturer of truck-mounted cranes. Their entrepreneurship and business instilled in him a drive to pursue his own ambitious ideas and seize opportunities.  Throughout his education in the 1960s, his primary focus of study was physics, having earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject and economics at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, a master’s in physics-math from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD in space physics from Rice University. Following a career in science, he recognized that solving human challenges was more captivating to him and noticed how many individuals struggle to comprehend fundamental concepts and often lack the ability to ask the right questions. This realization inspired him to reshape his career.

From 1985 to 2021, Dr. Schield taught statistics, critical thinking, and statistical literacy in the Department of Business Administration at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. In 2018, he was named a fellow in the American Statistical Association. In 2019, he was elected president of the National Numeracy Network. In 2023, Kendall-Hunt published his textbook, Statistical Literacy: Critical Thinking about Everyday Statistics. He has published over 100 papers with more than 1,000 citations. As of 2025, he is professor emeritus at Augsburg University, teaching online at the University of New Mexico and a visiting professor at New College of Florida.

Looking toward the future, Dr. Schield intends to remain active in education by delivering talks and publishing. He noted that his wife, Cynthia, has patiently awaited his retirement for the last 15 years. He has raised four adopted children from a former marriage; he has three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.