R. Michael Roberts (born October 23, 1940, in Menston, United Kingdom)[1] is an American biologist who is the Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Animal sciences and Biochemistry at the University of Missouri.

[4] His DPhil thesis was entitled The utilisation of ¹⁴C labelled substrates by growing plant organs (1965) and was supervised by Vernon S.

[12] Roberts served as Chief Scientist for the USDA’s National Research Initiative Competitive Grants Program (NRI) from 1998-2000.

[19] In brief, a postdoctoral fellow Dr. Kaushik Deb fabricated and falsified digital images that supported a paper published in Science.

[7] Among his key discoveries, R. Michael Roberts determined the equivalence of uteroferrin and a class of lysosomal enzymes, known as tartrate-resistant acid phosphatases (TRAPs).

[21] Roberts' group was the first to clone, identify, and characterize the temporal expression of trophoblast interferon-t in the ruminants sheep and cattle.

[26] He began to focus on the use of pluripotent stem cells and the development of models to study the emergence and differentiation of animal and human trophoblast.

[27] Among his group's contributions is a study on the importance of low oxygen atmospheres to control human stem cell differentiation.