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About

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.

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Skills

Experience

Professor

University of Cambridge

Dec-1973 to Present

Publication

  • dott image December, 2024

Disorders of compulsivity: a common bias towards learning habits

Why do we repeat choices that we know are bad for us? Decision making is characterized by the parallel engagement of two distinct systems, goal-directed and habitual, thought to arise from t...

  • dott image February, 2012

Abnormal Brain Structure Implicated in Stimulant Drug Addiction

There are significant structural changes in striatal and prefrontal brain regions of stimulant drugdependent individuals. However, it is not clear if these brain abnormalities predate drug-t...

Abnormal structure of frontostriatal brain systems is associated with aspects of impulsivity and compulsivity in cocaine dependence

A growing body of preclinical evidence indicates that addiction to cocaine is associated with neuroadaptive changes in frontostriatal brain systems. Human studies in cocaine-dependent indivi...

  • dott image October, 2010

Drug Addiction Endophenotypes: Impulsive Versus Sensation-Seeking Personality Traits

Background Genetic factors have been implicated in the development of substance abuse disorders, but the role of pre-existing vulnerability in addiction is still poorly understood. Personal...

  • dott image November, 2009

Probing Compulsive and Impulsive Behaviors, from Animal Models to Endophenotypes: A Narrative Review

Journal : Neuropsychopharmacology 1740-634X

Failures in cortical control of fronto-striatal neural circuits may underpin impulsive and compulsive acts. In this narrative review, we explore these behaviors from the perspective of neura...

  • dott image July, 2008

Orbitofrontal Dysfunction in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Their Unaffected Relatives

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by repetitive thoughts and behaviors associated with underlying dysregulation of frontostriatal circuitry. Central to neurobiological mod...

  • dott image December, 2007

Neurocognitive endophenotypes of obsessive-compulsive disorder

Endophenotypes (intermediate phenotypes) are objective, heritable, quantitative traits hypothesized to represent genetic risk for polygenic disorders at more biologically tractable levels th...

  • dott image Graham Murray
  • dott image August, 2007

Substantia nigra/ventral tegmental reward prediction error disruption in psychosis

While dopamine systems have been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and psychosis for many years, how dopamine dysfunction generates psychotic symptoms remains unknown. Recen...

  • dott image Graham Murray
  • dott image August, 2007

Disrupted prediction-error signal in psychosis: evidence for an associative account of delusions

Delusions are maladaptive beliefs about the world. Based upon experimental evidence that prediction error—a mismatch between expectancy and outcome—drives belief formation, this study ex...

  • dott image February, 2007

Impaired Cognitive Flexibility and Motor Inhibition in Unaffected First-Degree Relatives of Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Objective: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is highly heritable. Attempts to delineate precise genetic contributions have met with limited success. There is an ongoing search for intermed...