Sam has worked in neuroscience for nearly thirty years, and has spent the vast majority of his career focused on the biological bases of learning and memory. He undertook an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Sheffield before following up with an MSc in Neuroscience at University College London, where his research project was in the laboratory of Professor Steve Wilson, working on axon tract development in the zebrafish. After this, he started a PhD in the laboratory of Professor Chris Yeo, working on cerebellar mechanisms underlying motor learning, focusing on classical eyeblink conditioning to identify where and when plasticity supporting this form of learning occurs. After his PhD, Sam moved to the laboratory of Dr Tim Bliss, at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), where he worked on synaptic mechanisms of learning and memory in the hippocampus. After this, he moved to the US to work in the laboratory of Professor Mark Bear at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While in the Bear lab, Sam worked on mechanisms of visual cortical plasticity arising from experience and deprivation, eventually developing an undestanding of long-term visual habituation which served as a foundation for his own laboratory, which he started in 2017 at KCL. For the first eight years, the Cooke lab was based in the Department of Basic and Clinical Neurosciences (BCN) at the Denmark Hill campus. In the last year, the Cooke lab has relocated to the London Bridge campus of KCL, where it is now housed in the Wolfson Sensory, Pain and Regeneration Centre (SPaRC). In addition, to a wide range of research on learning and memory, Sam is committed to teaching undergraduate, post-graduate students and others. He runs modules on learning and memory and electrophysiology at KCL, but is also committed to improving learning among students based on what neuroscience and psychology has discovered about the biological basis of learning and memory.