Congratulations to Professorial Fellow, Professor Angela Roberts, who was awarded the Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation's (USA) 2020 Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience on Wednesday 7 October.
Angela’s laboratory combines pharmacological, cardiovascular, neuroimaging and genetic techniques to understand the brain basis of cognition and emotion. Recent scientific contributions have been in establishing non-human primate models of positive and negative emotion regulation and trait anxiety. She has revealed the distinct prefrontal cognitive processes that may underlie the varied aetiology of affective disorders and elucidated the role of dopaminergic and serotonergic modulation of these processes essential for the more effective targeting of current pharmacotherapies.
Angela graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in Neurobiology. She obtained her PhD in Neuroendocrinology from the University of Cambridge, working in the laboratory of Professor Joe Herbert, Department of Anatomy. She had by then developed a strong interest in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience and so joined the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge, first as a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Associate with Professor Trevor Robbins and then as a Royal Society University Research Fellow studying the neural and neurochemical basis of cognitive flexibility. She was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy in Cambridge and there became Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience and Professorial Fellow of Girton College. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016.
For more information, visit the BBR Foundation website.