Alice Roberts - Academic Career

Academic Career

After graduating in 1997, Roberts worked in clinical medicine as a junior doctor with the National Health Service in South Wales for 18 months. In 1998 she left clinical medicine and worked as an anatomy demonstrator in the Anatomy Department at the University of Bristol, becoming a lecturer there in 1999.

She spent more than seven years working part-time on her Ph. D. in paleopathology, the study of disease in ancient human remains, receiving the degree in 2008 with thesis titled Rotator Cuff Disease in humans and apes: a palaeopathological and evolutionary perspective on shoulder pathology. She worked as Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol Centre for Comparative and Clinical Anatomy where her main roles were teaching clinical anatomy, embryology, and physical anthropology, as well as researching osteoarchaeology and paleopathology. She stated in 2009 that she was working towards becoming a professor of anatomy.

From August 2009 until January 2012, she was a Visiting Fellow in both the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Department of Anatomy of the University of Bristol.

In February 2012, Roberts took up a new post as the University of Birmingham's first Professor of Public Engagement in Science.

She is currently the Director of Anatomy for the National Health Service Severn Deanery Postgraduate School of Surgery, and is also an Honorary Fellow of Hull York Medical School.