Telba Zalkind Irony is a Brazilian statistician, operations researcher, and proponent of Bayesian statistics. She works at the Food and Drug Administration, where she was formerly chief of biostatistics at the Office of Device Evaluation^[1] and is now deputy directory of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.^[2]

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.^[3] 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^[4] supervised by Richard E. Barlow.^[3] Before joining the FDA, she was part of the operations research department at George Washington University.^[3]

In 2010, she became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.^[5] 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".^[6]