Trevor Lamb (right) and Ed Pugh (left) being presented with the
Proctor Medal of ARVO (the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology), at the Annual Convention on 1 May 2006.

After obtaining a degree in electronic engineering at Melbourne University, Trevor Lamb transferred to physiology, before travelling to Cambridge in 1971 to undertake his Ph.D. There he met Denis Baylor in Alan Hodgkin's laboratory, and under their guidance began working on the retina: first on horizontal cells and then on photoreceptors.

During a productive post-doc in Baylor's lab in Stanford in 1977, he, King-Wai Yau, and Baylor developed the suction pipette technique for recording electrically from photoreceptors, and discovered that rods could respond reliably to individual photons of light. Subsequently he was based in Cambridge for 25 years, and continued to work on photoreceptors - on the molecular mechanisms of activation and inactivation of the light response, and on light adaptation and dark adaptation.

In the early 1990s he and Edward Pugh (at University of Pennsylvania) developed a mathematical description of the molecular reactions underlying the onset phase of the photoreceptor's light response, which has provided important insights into the transduction mechanism. In 1993 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year was promoted to a chair at Cambridge. In the mid-1990s he branched out into using the electroretinogram (ERG) as a tool for studying photoreceptors in vivo.

His current and planned research combines the use of ERG recordings from human subjects with the use of suction pipette recordings from the photoreceptors of transgenic animals, together with modelling approaches, in order to provide a more complete understanding of the response of photoreceptors and other retinal neurons to light. In 2002 Trevor Lamb was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, which he took up in January 2003.