Professor Barry Everitt graduated from the University of Hull with a B.Sc. in Zoology in 1967. He gained his Ph.D. in behavioural neuroendocrinology from the University of Birmingham in 1970. Following postdoctoral neuroscience research as an MRC Fellow at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, he joined the Department of Anatomy at the University of Cambridge as a lecturer in 1974 and was appointed Reader in Neuroscience in 1991. He moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology in Cambridge in 1994 and was elected Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience in 1997. He was Master of Downing College from 2003 to 2013 and is currently Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, established by a gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund a scholarship programme in Cambridge for overseas graduate students. He is President-elect of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and will assume the Presidency in 2016.
He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2007), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2008) and a Member of EMBO in 2014. He has received honorary D.Sc. degrees from both his almae matres (Hull University in 2009; Birmingham University in 2010) and an honorary MD from the Karolinska Institutet in 2015. He was the co-recipient of the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2011), the European Behavioural Pharmacological Society Distinguished Achievement Award (2011), the FENS-EJN Award (2012) and the British Association for Psychopharmacology Lifetime Achievement Award (2012). He has been President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology (1992-4), the European Brain and Behaviour Society (1998-2000) and the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society (2003-5). He was Chair of the International Fellowships Committee of the Human Frontier Science Program (1994-6), a member of the MRC Neurosciences and Mental Health Board (1999-2003) and a Scientific Counsellor for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Washington DC, 2002-6). He was Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience from 1997-2008 and has been a Reviewing Editor for the journal Science since 2005. He is a member of the council of the Society for Neuroscience and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.