This award recognizes an SOT member who has made distinguished contributions to toxicology throughout an entire career in areas such as research, teaching, regulatory activities, consulting, and service to the Society.
Ruth A. Roberts, PhD, ATS, ERT, FRSB, FBTS, FRCPath, is recognized with the 2026 SOT Merit Award for an outstanding career that has advanced mechanistic toxicology, transformed approaches to drug and chemical safety assessment, and helped train and inspire the next generation of toxicologists.
Dr. Roberts earned a Class I BSc (Hons) in biochemistry in 1984 and a PhD from the Faculty of Medical Oncology at the University of Manchester in 1987. She completed postdoctoral training at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. Her career has spanned senior leadership roles in industry, academia, and consultancy, including Cancer Biology Group Leader at Zeneca/Syngenta Central Toxicology Laboratory; Director of Toxicology at Aventis in Paris; and Director of Toxicology and Global Head of Regulatory Safety at AstraZeneca in the United Kingdom and Sweden. She is a Cofounder and Director of ApconiX, a nonclinical safety science consultancy and ion channel research company and since 2016 has served as Chair and Director of Drug Discovery at the University of Birmingham, where she founded and leads the Birmingham Drug Discovery Hub.
Across nearly 200 publications, Dr. Roberts has made seminal contributions in chemical carcinogenesis, tumor biology, apoptosis, drug safety, and regulatory science. Her early work helped demonstrate that rodent liver tumors produced by PPARα agonists are not relevant to human cancer risk, informing regulatory decision-making and risk assessment. She has also been an influential leader in modernizing nonclinical safety assessment, advancing science-led study design, questioning routine use of recovery groups, and advocating for evidence-based approaches in place of default testing paradigms. More recently, she has collaborated with colleagues at the US Food and Drug Administration to explore how machine learning can support toxicology decision-making and deliver 3Rs benefits while improving translation to human risk.
Dr. Roberts’s scientific and leadership accomplishments have been recognized through numerous honors, including the SOT Achievement Award, the EUROTOX Bo Holmstedt Award, the SOT Founders Award (for Outstanding Leadership in Toxicology), the Academy of Toxicological Sciences “Millie” Award, and the SOT Drug Discovery Research Paper of the Year Award. ApconiX has also been recognized with the Queen’s Award 2022 and The King’s Award 2024 for Enterprise in International Trade and the 2025 King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation.
Within SOT and the broader toxicology community, Dr. Roberts has demonstrated exceptional commitment to service and mentoring. She has been an SOT member since 1998; has been a regular presenter, organizer, and chair of Scientific Sessions; and has delivered various talks for SOT, including “The Entrepreneurial Toxicologist.”
In parallel, she has sustained a long-standing dedication to education through teaching in undergraduate, master’s, and PhD programs; supervision of graduate students and industrial postdoctoral fellows; and mentoring of scientists at all career stages, particularly those from institutions with limited toxicology resources.
Through her innovative research, influential leadership, and unwavering commitment to training and service, Dr. Ruth A. Roberts exemplifies the distinguished, career-long contributions recognized by the SOT Merit Award.
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