[2] She earned her Ph.D. in 1974 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her dissertation, A Double Sampling Scheme Model for Eliminating Measurement Process Bias and Estimating Measurement Errors in Surveys, was jointly supervised by Daniel G. Horvitz and Gary Grove Koch.
[3] She worked as a statistician for RTI International, the Battelle Memorial Institute, and National Center for Health Statistics, before retiring to operate a consulting business and run an organic farm on the Alston-DeGraffenried Plantation historic site in Chatham County, North Carolina.
[1][4] With William D. Kalsbeek, Lessler is the author of Nonsampling Error in Surveys (Wiley, 1992).
[6] She is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.