Telba Irony

Telba Zalkind Irony
Born	São Paulo, Brazil
Education	University of São Paulo University of California, Berkeley
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics Operations research
Institutions	George Washington University Food and Drug Administration
Thesis	Modeling, Information Extraction and Decision Making a Bayesian Approach to Some Engineering Problems  (1989)
Doctoral advisor	Richard E. Barlow

Telba Zalkind Irony is a Brazilian statistician, operations researcher, and proponent of Bayesian statistics. After working at the Food and Drug Administration, as chief of biostatistics at the Office of Device Evaluation ^[1] and deputy director of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, ^[2] she moved to Janssen R&D, a division of Johnson & Johnson, as Senior Scientific Director in Quantitative Sciences. ^[3]

Irony was born in São Paulo, and studied physics and statistics at the University of São Paulo, earning both a bachelor's degree and master's degree there. ^[4] She obtained her Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research in 1989 from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation Modeling, Information Extraction and Decision Making a Bayesian Approach to Some Engineering Problems ^[5] supervised by Richard E. Barlow. ^[4] Irony was an assistant professor of operations research in the department of engineering at George Washington University from 1990 to 1998. She joined the Food and Drug Administration in 1998, where she works in the biostatistics division. ^[4]

In 2010, she became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. ^[6] In 2014, she won the Excellence in Analytical Science Award of the Food and Drug Administration "for spearheading innovative regulatory science studies, culminating in the release of novel guidance documents; supporting complex policy decision-making; and changing the submission review paradigm". ^[7]

References

1. "Telba Irony, PhD", Speaker biography, 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, 2015, retrieved 17 November 2017
2. "Telba Irony, FDA", Speaker biography, DIA 2017 Annual Meeting, 2017, retrieved 17 November 2017
3. "Telba Irony", Speaker biography, DIA 2022 Annual Meeting, 2022, retrieved 20 November 2025
4. Author profile from Irony, T.Z.; Barlow, R.E. (March 1993), "Curiosities in choosing system components: a Bayes analysis", IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 42 (1): 128–131, doi:10.1109/24.210283
5. "Modeling, Information Extraction and Decision Making a Bayesian Approach to Some Engineering Problems", Hathitrust Digital Library, Catalog entry, 1989, retrieved 17 November 2017
6. ASA Fellows list, American Statistical Association, retrieved 15 November 2017
7. Excellence in Analytical Science 2009-Present, Food and Drug Administration, archived from the original on 6 April 2017, retrieved 22 November 2017