Professor Trevor Williams Robbins (CBE FRS FMedSci) is a former Head of the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, a recipient of many contribution awards, and one of the most influential brain scientists of the modern era (1, 2). Today, Professor Robbins is a fellow of the Downing College, where he holds the position in Mental Health and Neuropsychiatry.
In 1997, Trevor Robbins became the first academic in Cambridge to be appointed as a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, retaining this position as Emeritus Professor today. He was Chair of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Department from 2002 to 2017.
For over 10 years Professor Robbins was director of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, - a collaborative project involving different Schools and multiple Departments within the University of Cambridge funded between 2003 and 2015. The extensive work of the Institute renders publications to this day. See Research below for more.
In February 2024, the Department of Psychology launched a new communal space for psychophysiological research, - a common experimental area named after Professor Robbins to commemorate his academic legacy of promoting inter-school collaboration and translational science. For more visit Trevor Robbins Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratories.
Biography
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 to October 2017. He was 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 was to inter-relate basic and clinical research in psychiatry and neurology (for more see below). 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 Downing College as well as 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 nearly 1000 full papers in scientific journals and has co-edited 10 books:
- Psychology for Medicine (1988);
- The Prefrontal Cortex: Executive and Cognitive Functions (1998);
- Disorders of Brain and Mind, Volume 2 (2003);
- Drugs and the Future (2006);
- The Neurobiology of Addiction (2010);
- Decision-Making, Affect and Learning: Attention and Performance (2011);
- Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain (2012);
- Translational Neuropsychopharmacology (2016);
- The Neurobiology and Treatment of OCD: Accelerating Progress (2021);
- The Frontal Cortex: Organization, Networks, and Function (2024).
Trevor was recently ranked as "the 4th most influential brain scientist of the modern era" by Semantic Scholar and recently topped world-wide as well as national lists for both Psychology and Neuroscience.
Trevor won the inaugural European Behavioural Society "Distinguished Scientific Contribution" in 2000 and the IPSEN Foundation 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. In 2021, he received the William James Fellowship Award of the Association of Psychological studies.
Research
Professor Trevor Robbins works in the areas of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, with a special emphasis on psychopharmacology. He is particularly interested in the functions of the frontal lobes of the brain and their connections with other regions, including the so-called brain reward systems in the striatum and the limbic system. These brain systems are relevant to such neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, frontal dementia, schizophrenia, depression, drug addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as frontal lobe injury. Professor Robbins uses a variety of techniques ranging from the co-invented computerized neuropsychological test battery (‘CANTAB’) for assessing cognition in patients to functional brain imaging and molecular neuropharmacology. His work seeks to translate basic neuroscience findings into clinical application, specifically the diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders. Two particular current interests are characterising beneficial effects of drugs on cognition, as may occur with 'cognitive enhancing' drugs used clinically, and deleterious effects of drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and amphetamine.
Trevor is continuing to guide individual students and researchers.
For over 10 years, Prof Robbins directed the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute. Since BCNI inception in 2003, the work by the affiliated members resulted in over 1000 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. BCNI projects still generate outputs today. Since the funding of the Institute stopped, the BCNI quarters are an open experimental area: members of the Department are welcome to book the testing suites for their data collection.
The Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute
The BCNI was originally funded as an MRC Centre on a development grant in 2003, before receiving full, 10 year joint funding from the MRC and Strategic Award from Welcome Trust (2005-2015). The Director was Professor TW Robbins and the Clinical Director, Prof. ET Bullmore. The University supported the establishment of the BCNI on the Downing Site in refurbished premises. The mission of the BCNI was to inter-relate basic and clinical research in psychiatry and neurology. It brought together Cambridge's geographically distributed strengths in basic and clinical neuroscience to optimise translational impact on a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders including addiction, depression, schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, as well as brain injury. The BCNI comprised about 200 neuroscientists (including PhD students funded by the MRC and elsewhere, as well as post-docs) from several departments in the School of Biological Sciences, especially Psychology and the Clinical School, especially Psychiatry. A diagram of some of the main principal scientific membership is shown below.
The main research themes of the BCNI were as follows:
Translation – of cognitive neuroscientific concepts both across species, and from healthy to disordered groups, supported by core animal research and neuroimaging infrastructure.
Traits –delineation of neurocognitive traits cutting across traditional diagnostic boundaries in neuropsychiatry – e.g., the trait of impulsivity which transcends both addiction and ADHD - and intermediate endophenotypes – e.g. brain functional and cognitive markers mediating heritable risk for neuropsychiatric disorders facilitating the search for genetic factors.
Treatments – proactively developing methodology and expertise for innovative preclinical and experimental medicine studies of tool compounds; working in partnership with industry for neurocognitive characterization of specific drug targets and early-stage new drug development
Training – increasing the scope and scale of postgraduate training options by creating an expanded 3 year PhD programme in translational neuroscience for BCNI-affiliated PhD students and by setting up a 1 year MPhil course
Overall, BCNI has a thriving record of not only publishing research articles and reviews but also media and public engagement, as well as outreach.
See the running document of the ongoing publications here.
Publications
Most prominent publications shortlisted to date (2025) include
Aron, A.R., Fletcher, P.C., Bullmore, E.T., Sahakian, B.J. & Robbins, T.W. (2003) Stop-signal inhibition disrupted by damage to right inferior frontal gyrus in humans. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 115-116.
Clarke, H.F., Dalley, J.W., Crofts, H.S., Robbins, T.W. & Roberts, A.C. (2004) Cognitive inflexibility after prefrontal serotonin depletion. Science, 304, 878-880.
Everitt, B.J. & Robbins, T.W. (2005) Neural systems of reinforcement for drug addiction: from actions to habits to compulsion. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1481-1489.
Dalley, J.W., Fryer, T.D., Brichard, L., Robinson, E.S.J., Theobald, D.E.H., Lääne, K., Peña, Y., Murphy, E.R., Shah, Y., Probst, K., Abakumova, I., Aigbirhio, F.I., Richards, H.K., Hong, Y., Baron, J.C., Everitt, B.J., Robbins, T.W. (2007) Nucleus accumbens D2/3 receptors predict trait impulsivity and cocaine reinforcement. Science, 315, 1267-1270.
Belin, D., Mar, A.C., Dalley, J.W., Robbins, T.W. & Everitt, B.J. (2008) High impulsivity predicts the switch to compulsive cocaine-taking. Science, 320, 1352-1355.
Crockett, M.J., Clark, L., Tabibnia, G., Lieberman, M.D. & Robbins, T.W. (2008) Serotonin modulates behavioural reactions to unfairness. Science, 320, 1739.
Chamberlain, S.R., Menzies, L., Hampshire, A., Suckling, J., Fineberg, N.A., del Campo, N., Aitken, M.R.F., Craig, K., Owen, A.M., Bullmore, E.T., Robbins, T.W. & Sahakian, B.J. (2008) Orbitofrontal dysfunction in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and their unaffected relatives. Science, 321, 421-422
Ersche, K.D., Jones, P.S., Williams, G.B., Turton, A.J., Robbins, T.W. & Bullmore, E.T. (2012) Abnormal brain structure implicated in stimulant drug addiction. Science, 335, 601-604.
Bari, A. & Robbins, T.W. (2013) Inhibition and impulsivity: behavioral and neural basis of response control. Progress in Neurobiology, 108, 44-79.
Ersche KD, Gillan CM, Jones PS, Williams GB, Ward LH, Luijten M, de Wit S, Sahakian BJ, Bullmore ET, Robbins TW. (2016) Carrots and sticks fail to change behavior in cocaine addiction. Science, 352(6292), 1468-71.
Vaghi MM, Vértes PE, Kitzbichler MG, Apergis-Schoute AM, van der Flier FE, Fineberg NA, Sule A, Zaman R, Voon V, Kundu P, Bullmore ET, Robbins TW. (2017) Specific Frontostriatal Circuits for Impaired Cognitive Flexibility and Goal-Directed Planning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Evidence From Resting-State Functional Connectivity. Biol Psychiatry, 81(8), 708-717.
Friedman NP, Robbins TW. (2022) The role of prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and executive function. Neuropsychopharmacology. 47, 72-89.
Langley C, Sahakian BJ, Robbins TW (2023) Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB). Chapter 28 in The Sage Handbook of Clinical Neuropsychology pp435-468 Sage, Los Angeles, London ISBN 978-15297-1776-1
Biria M, Banca P, Healy MP, Keser E, Sawiak SJ, Rodgers CT, Rua C, de Souza AMFLP, Marzuki AA, Sule A, Ersche KD, Robbins TW. (2023) Cortical glutamate and GABA are related to compulsive behaviour in individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder and healthy controls. Nat Commun. 14, 3324.
Robbins TW, Banca P, Belin D. From compulsivity to compulsion: the neural basis of compulsive disorders. (2024) Nat Rev Neurosci. 25, 313-333.
For exhaustive list see Google Scholar or PubMed
