Irene is Professor at Imperial College London and MRC Investigator at the MRC LMS, London (UK). She received her DPhil in Genetics from the University of Oxford (UK), working with Kay E. Davies, and explored how neurons acquire their identity during postdoctoral work with Stefan Thor at Harvard (USA), Linkoping University (Sweden) and then Alex Gould at NIMR (now Crick Institute, UK). She established her own lab at the University of Cambridge in 2008 thanks to a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. She then moved to London to become a Programme Leader at the MRC LMS, Imperial College London at the end of 2012. She was elected to the EMBO YIP programme in 2012, to EMBO in 2017, and to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2019. She is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant and, previously, an ERC Starting Grant.