I graduated from the University of Sussex in 1981 with a degree in Neurobiology and then obtained a PhD in Neuroendocrinology in 1985 at the Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge. By then I had developed a strong interest in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience and stayed on in Cambridge, moving to Experimental Psychology, to conduct postdoctoral studies into the neural and neurochemical basis of cognitive flexibility in a new world primate, the marmoset. Following five years as a Royal Society University Research Fellow I was appointed lecturer in the Department of Anatomy in 1996. There I developed a research programme to study prefrontal circuits underlying the regulation of positive and negative emotion in primates. My lab combines neural, pharmacological, cardiovascular, neuroimaging and genetic techniques to dissect out the role of distinct prefrontal circuits, and their modulation by the monoamines, in the regulation of threat and reward elicited responses, relevant to our understanding of symptoms of anxiety and anhedonia in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. My research has been funded continuously by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. Early in my career I co-developed Monkey CANTAB with Trevor Robbins, a suite of computerised behavioural tests designed to measure the cognitive capabilities of primates that promoted the translation of neurobiological findings in animals into the clinic. This suite of tests is now used by many academic and pharmaceutical laboratories around the world. I was appointed Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience and Professorial Fellow of Girton College in 2009 and am currently leading the new Translational Neuroimaging Laboratory in Cambridge which has a 9.4T MRI scanner for imaging mice, rats and marmosets. I was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016, received the Goldman-Rakic Prize for outstanding achievements in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2020 and gave the European Brain and Behaviour Prize lecture the same year.