Born in South Africa, Henry Plotkin gained his PhD from the University of London in 1968 and was awarded a Medical Research Council Travelling Fellowship the following year, which took him to the United States during the period1970-1972 where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He returned to the UK in 1972 and was appointed a lecturer in psychology at University College London at the start of the 1972-73 academic year. In 1988 the title of Reader was conferred on him, and in 1993 he was made Professor of Psychobiology. He was Head of the Department of Psychology at UCL during the period 1993-1998, and in 2005 became Emeritus Professor of Psychology.