Alice May RobertsFRSB (born 19 May 1973)[2] is an English academic, TV presenter and author. Since 2012 she has been Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham. She was president of the charity Humanists UK between January 2019 and May 2022.[3] She is now a vice-president of the organisation.[4]
Early life and education
Roberts was born in Bristol in 1973,[5] the daughter of an aeronautical engineer and an English and arts teacher.[6] She grew up in the Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym where she attended the private Red Maids' School.[5][7][8] In December 1988, she won the BBC1 Blue Peter Young Artists competition, appearing with her picture and the presenters on the front cover of the 10 December 1988 edition of the Radio Times.[9]
She spent seven years working part-time on her PhD in paleopathology, receiving the degree in 2008.[5][7][13] She was a 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.[7][10][14] She stated in 2009 that she was working towards becoming a professor of anatomy.[15]
In 2009, she co-presented modules for the Beating Bipolar programme, the first online treatment package for bipolar depression, trialled by Cardiff University researchers. A clinical trial began in June 2009 involving about 100 patients with bipolar disorder in South Wales.[16]
From August 2009 until January 2012, Roberts was a visiting fellow in both the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Department of Anatomy of the University of Bristol.[10][17][18]
From 2009 to 2016 Roberts was Director of Anatomy at the NHS Severn Deanery School of Surgery[11] and also an honorary fellow at Hull York Medical School.[19][20]
Roberts has been a member of the advisory board of Cheltenham Science Festival for 10 years and a member of the Advisory Board of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath since 2018.[24]
Writing in the i newspaper in 2016, Roberts dismissed the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) as a distraction "from the emerging story of human evolution that is more interesting and complex", adding that AAH has become "a theory of everything" that is simultaneously "too extravagant and too simple". She concluded by saying that "science is about evidence, not wishful thinking".[25][26]
In January 2021, Roberts presented a 10-part narrative history series about the human body entitled Bodies on BBC Radio 4.[29]
Television career
A presenter of science and history television documentaries, Roberts was one of the regular co-presenters of the BBC geographical and environmental series Coast.[30]
Roberts first appeared on television in the Time Team Live 2001 episode,[31][32] working on Anglo-Saxon burials at Breamore, Hampshire. She served as a bone specialist and general presenter in many episodes, including the spin-off series Extreme Archaeology. In August 2006, a Time Team special episode Big Royal Dig investigated archaeology of Britain's royal palaces; Roberts was one of the main presenters.
In August 2010, she presented a one-hour documentary on BBC Four, Wild Swimming, inspired by Roger Deakin's book Waterlog.[36] Roberts presented a four-part BBC Two series on archaeology in August–September 2010, Digging for Britain.[37][38] Roberts explained, "We're taking a fresh approach by showing British archaeology as it's happening out in the field, from the excitement of artefacts as they come out of the ground, through to analysing them in the lab and working out what they tell us about human history."[39] The series returned in 2011 and again (on BBC Four) in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024.[40]
In March 2011, she presented a BBC documentary in the Horizon series entitled Are We Still Evolving?[41] Later in 2011, she presented another BBC documentary called How to Build a Dinosaur,[42] which aired on BBC4 on 21 September 2011.
She presented the series Origins of Us, which aired on BBC Two in October 2011, examining how the human body has adapted through seven million years of evolution.[43] The last part of this series featured Roberts visiting the Rift Valley in East Africa.
In April 2012, Roberts presented Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice on BBC Two.[44] From 22 to 24 October 2012, she appeared, with co-presenter Dr George McGavin, in the BBC series Prehistoric Autopsy,[45] which discussed the remains of early hominins such as Neanderthals, Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. In May and June 2013 she presented the BBC Two series Ice Age Giants.[46] In September 2014, she was a presenter on the Horizon programme Is Your Brain Male or Female?[47]
In October 2014, she presented Spider House.[48] In 2015, she co-presented a 3-part BBC TV documentary with Neil Oliver entitled The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice[49] and wrote a book to tie in with the series: The Celts: Search for a Civilisation.[50] In April–May 2016, she co-presented the BBC Two programme Food Detectives which looked at food nutrition and its effects on the body. In August 2016, she presented the BBC Four documentary Britain's Pompeii: A Village Lost in Time, which explored the Must Farm Bronze Age settlement in Cambridgeshire.[51] In May 2017, she was a presenter of the BBC Two documentary The Day The Dinosaurs Died.[52] In April 2018, she presented the six-part Channel 4 series Britain's Most Historic Towns,[53] which examines the history of British towns, which was followed by a second series in May 2019 and a third series in November 2020.
In September 2018, she presented the BBC Two documentary King Arthur's Britain: The Truth Unearthed, which examines new archaeological discoveries that cast light on the political and trading situation in Britain during the Early Middle Ages.[54] In December 2018, she presented a series of three Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, titled Who am I? and broadcast on BBC Four, with guest lecturer Aoife McLysaght.[27]
On 4 August 2020, Roberts was the guest on BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific.[55] Aired as a three-part series in September 2020, Roberts co-presented the BBC's The Big Dig focusing on the finds at St. James's Park in London and Park Street in Birmingham.
On 14 March 2022, Curse Of The Ancients with Alice Roberts, a five-part documentary series presented by Roberts premiered on Sky History.[60] In October Roberts presented Royal Autopsy, a two-part documentary series shown on Sky History; a second series was commissioned in November 2023.[61] The series examined the deaths of Queen Elizabeth I and King Charles II, and then Queen Anne, Queen Mary I, King Henry IV and King George IV.[62] Roberts presented the second series of Royal Autopsy that aired during April 2024.[63]
In March and April 2023, Roberts presented the four-part Channel 4 series Fortress Britain with Alice Roberts.[64] In June, Roberts presented the four-part Channel 4 series Ancient Egypt by Train with Alice Roberts,[65]Ottoman Empire by Train with Alice Roberts during autumn 2024.[66] and Ancient Greece by Train with Alice Roberts during spring 2025.[67]
In May 2024, Roberts presented the documentary The Lost Scrolls of Pompeii: New Revelations, which aired on Channel 5.[68]
On 22 May 2022, Roberts unveiled the Statue of Mary Anning at Lyme Regis; the statue was the result of a crowdfunded campaign ("Mary Anning Rocks") to commission and display a statue to the paleontologistMary Anning in Lyme Regis.[79]
Roberts lives with her husband, David Stevens, and two children, a daughter born in 2010 and a son born in 2013.[80] She met her husband in Cardiff in 1995 when she was a medical student and he was an archaeology student.[81][5] They married in 2009.[82]
She is a pescatarian,[83] "a confirmed atheist"[84] and former president of Humanists UK, beginning her three-and-a-half-year term in January 2019.[85][28] She is now a vice president of the organisation.[4] Her children were assigned a faith school due to over-subscription of her local community schools; she campaigns against state-funded religious schools, citing her story as an example of the problems perpetuated by faith schools.[86]
Roberts enjoys watercolour painting, surfing, wild swimming, cycling, gardening and pub quizzes.[5] Roberts is an organiser of the Cheltenham Science Festival and school outreach programmes within the University of Bristol's Medical Sciences Division.[7] In March 2007, she hosted the Bristol Medical School's charity dance show Clicendales 2007, to raise funds for the charity CLIC Sargent.[87]
Roberts took her baby daughter with her when touring for the six-month filming of the first series of Digging for Britain in 2010.[39]
Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Archaeopress. 2007. ISBN978-1-4073-0035-1. OCLC124507736.
Robson-Brown, Kate; Roberts, Alice (2007). BABAO 2004 : Proceedings of the 6th Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, University of Bristol. British Archaeological Reports. Oxford, England: Archaeopress. ISBN978-1-4073-0035-1.
Copson, Andrew; Roberts, Alice (2020). The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN978-0349425467.
Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials. Simon & Schuster. 2021. ISBN978-1471188015.
Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain. Simon & Schuster UK. 2022. ISBN978-1398510036
^ abRoberts, Alice (2007). Don't Die Young: An Anatomist's Guide to Your Organs and Your Health. Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2007. ISBN978-0-7475-9025-5.
^Higgins, Charlotte (16 February 2021). "Another part of the Stonehenge mystery has been unearthed before our eyes". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 February 2021. Retrieved 19 February 2021. What is the Stonehenge that Parker Pearson brings us? It is a Stonehenge of a people who were competent and able. A Stonehenge of migrants, of people who travelled great distances, who gathered together in large numbers to erect remarkable structures, who cooperated. This is a speculative picture and tentative, as Parker Pearson would surely be the first to admit.
^Brown, K. R.; Silver, I. A.; Musgrave, J. H.; Roberts, A. M. (2010). "The use of μCT technology to identify skull fracture in a case involving blunt force trauma". Forensic Science International. 206 (1–3): e8 –e11. doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2010.06.013. PMID20673617.
^Lockwood, A. M.; Roberts, A. M. (2007). "The anatomy demonstrator of the future: An examination of the role of the medically-qualified anatomy demonstrator in the context of tomorrow's doctors and modernizing medical careers". Clinical Anatomy. 20 (4): 455–459. doi:10.1002/ca.20427. PMID17072876. S2CID46567268.
^Roberts, A. M.; Robson-Brown, K.; Musgrave, J. H.; Leslie, I. (2006). "A case of bilateral scapholunate advanced collapse in a Romano-British skeleton from Ancaster". International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. 16 (3): 208. doi:10.1002/oa.817.
