[4] Irish was drawn into research from a young age when visiting the Boston Science Museum.
[5] She has taught numerous undergraduate students at Yale University and focused on the importance of evidence-based thinking.
She began working with Arabidopsis as it was becoming a model organism, serving as a "botanical Drosophila".
[4] This has also included research into the morphogenesis of thorns in Citrus, which was found to be related to the rest of lateral stem cells.
[9] Irish is generally interested in patterns and timing of development, which she has explored through fate maps and gene expression[10]