Lifetime Achievement Award for Founding Professor

Posted on 30 September 2014

Peter Venables receives the BPS Lifetime Achievement Award.

Photo credit: Tony Dale, BPS

Professor Peter Venables, the founder of our department and former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University, has been awarded the British Psychological Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Professor Venables, is now 91 and still active in research. His career has spanned the entire development of modern psychology. He was a pioneer of the application of physiological measures to psychological questions with a particular focus on clinical and developmental issues. He became a world-leading authority on schizophrenia and has made important and diverse contributions to cognitive, neuroanatomical, neurodevelopmental fields. His early work foreshadowed the growth of cognitive neuroscience as a discipline and he founded the British Psychophysiological Society which went on to become the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience. His perspective was influential in establishing the experimental and biological flavour of research and teaching in Psychology at York, which remains to this day.

Peter Venables is the third successive York-based recipient of the BPS Lifetime Achievement Award, following on from Professors Alan Baddeley and Andy Young. The awards recognize the impact that these individuals have had on psychology, but just as importantly Professor Venables and his colleagues helped build an environment where further generations of psychological research and scholarship are flourishing.