David BELIN – Cambridge

David Belin is professor in Behavioural Neuroscience at the Department of psychology of the University of Cambridge.

His laboratory studies the psychological, neural and cellular basis of the individual vulnerability to Impulsive/Compulsive Spectrum Disorders, with a particular interest in drug addiction.

David Belin studied the Cellular and molecular physiology of the cell at the University of Bordeaux. He then did a Master in Neuroscience and then in 2002, started a PhD under the supervision of Dr Véronique Deroche-Gamonet during which he established the first multidimensional preclinical model of addiction that enabled him to identify differential behavioural markers of the tendency to acquire drug use and that to switch to addiction.

Immediately after his PhD, completed in December 2005, he moved to Cambridge in January 2006 to work as a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Professor Barry Everitt on the intrastriatal mechanisms that support the development of drug seeking habits and the transition from impulsivity to compulsivity that takes place over the coure of the development of drug addiction. In 2009 he established his laboratory at INSERM in France, but returned to Cambridge in 2013, initially as a Lecturer in Neuroscience at the Department of Pharmacology. In October 2016, he moved back to the Department go Psychology where he has since become a professor in Behavioural Neuroscience.

His research has been funded by the INSERM (Inserm Avenir grant), the French research Agency (ANR), and more recently the Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust and Medical research Council.

Professor Belin has organized, and contributed to, several symposia for the SFN and EBPS, the biennial meeting of which he organized and hosted in La Rochelle in 2013. He is an alumni of the FENS/Kavli Excellence Network and a senior editor of Brain and Behavior.