The Development of CANTAB

Trevor Robbins is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience (since 1997) and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge (since 2002). He is also Director of the Cambridge University MRC-Wellcome Trust funded Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI), the main objective of which is to inter-relate basic and clinical research in psychiatry and neurology. Professor Robbins is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Royal Society. He is the co-inventor of the neuropsychological test battery CANTAB, which is used in over 500 institutes and clinical centres world-wide. Trevor was President of the British Neuroscience Association from 2009-2011. He has also been a past president of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society and the British Association of Psychopharmacology. He has edited the journal Psychopharmacology since 1980 and joined the advisory editorial board of Science in January 2003. 

He has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers and 70 chapters in scientific journals and has co-edited 7 books. He is one of the 100 most cited neuroscientists according to the International Statistical Institute (ISI) (H index=152). He was awarded the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society’s inaugural Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001 and in 2005 he shared the IPSEN Fondation Prize in Neuronal Plasticity and was the Kavli Distinguished International Scientist Lecturer at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting the same year. In 2011 he was jointly awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association and in May 2014 he was awarded a co-share of the prestigious ‘Brain Prize’ (one million euros) of the Grete Lundbeck European Neuroscience Foundation. In 2012 he received the CBE in the U.K. New Year Honours list “for services to medical research.”