Victor Denenberg

Victor H. Denenberg (April 3, 1925 – July 19, 2008) was an American developmental psychobiologist. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1953 from Purdue University, where he became assistant professor and remained through 1969. In 1969 he became a professor at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, in the newly formed program in Biobehavioral Sciences, of which he was the head from 1984 to 2000. After his retirement in 2000, he became a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Denenberg published over 400 scholarly papers and book chapters and trained over 70 M.S. and Ph.D. students. While an academic icon of his era, Denenberg was not a strong advocate for promoting diversity in the behavioral and cognitive sciences. His final intellectual tour de force was a scientific publication that essentially challenges his own life's work in comparative psychology bringing into question the validity of using transgenic murine models of learning and memory.