Trevor Robbins

Trevor Robbins was appointed in 1997 as the Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Professor of Experimental Psychology (and Head of Department) at Cambridge from October 2002-October 2017. He is also Director of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI), jointly funded by the Medical Research Council and the Welcome Trust. The mission of the BCNI is to inter-relate basic and clinical research in psychiatry and neurology for such conditions as Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Alzheimer's diseases, frontal lobe injury, schizophrenia, depression, drug addiction and developmental syndromes such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Trevor's current research is focused on impulsive-compulsive disorders (such as OCD and drug addiction) and fronto-striatal systems of the brain.

Trevor is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (1990), British Pharmacological Society (2017), the Academy of Medical Sciences (2000) and the Royal Society (2005). He has been President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society (1992-1994) and he won that Society's inaugural Distinguished Scientist Award in 2001. He was also President of the British Association of Psychopharmacology from 1996 to 1997. He has edited the journal Psychopharmacology since 1980 and joined the editorial board of Science in January 2003. He has been a member of the Medical Research Council (UK) and chaired the Neuroscience and Mental Health Board from 1995 until 1999.

He has been included on a list of the 100 most cited neuroscientists by ISI, has published over 800 full papers in scientific journals and has co-edited eight books (Psychology for Medicine: The Prefrontal Cortex; Executive and Cognitive Function: Disorders of Brain and Mind 2:Drugs and the Future: The Neurobiology of Addiction; New Vistas. Decision-making, Affect and Learning: Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain; and Translational Neuropsychopharmacology). He was recently ranked as "the 4th most influential brain scientist of the modern era". Read more

Trevor won the inaugural European Behavioural Society "Distinguished Scientific Contribution" in 2000 and the IPSEN Fondation Neuroplasticity prize in 2005. He was jointly awarded (with B.J. Everitt) the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 2011 and received the CBE for contributions to medical research in the New Year Honours List of 2012. He co-shared, with S. Dehaene and G. Rizzolatti, the 2014 Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize (€ 1 million) for outstanding contributions to European neuroscience. In 2015 he received (with BJ Sahakian) the Robert Sommer Award for research into schizophrenia. In 2016 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. In 2017 he received the Gold Medal from the Society of Biological Psychiatry and also the Patricia Goldman-Rakic Award for Cognitive Neuroscience. In 2018 he became an Honorary Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai.