Irene Roberts is a British physician-scientist specializing in pediatric hematology. She is an emeritus professor of paediatric haematology at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford.
Roberts obtained her medical degree from Glasgow University, learning embryology from Regius Professor of Anatomy Raymond Scothorne. She found the "most beautiful cells" under the microscope to be in the developing bone and bone marrow. After what she called a "dalliance with a career in obstetrics...(a complete failure)", Roberts trained in pediatrics at Glasgow's Royal Hospital for Sick Children. She furthered her training in pediatric hematology at Vanderbilt University and did her postdoctoral work at Imperial College London.
Roberts took a faculty position at Imperial College London, moving to the University of Oxford's Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in 2013. She studied how blood cells develop in prenatal liver and bone marrow using single-cell multiomics to identify key gene patterns that differed in Down syndrome patients, as part of the Human Cell Atlas initiative. She published hundreds of papers on benign and malignant childhood blood disorders and has an h-index of 70.
Roberts juggled "a busy clinical job and two young children" while at her first faculty position.