[1] In 1984, he obtained funding through the Royal Society's Science Exchange Programme to work with Jean-Marc Jallon in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, where he was introduced to the use of pheromones and smell by animals as a means of communication.

[1] Once his Royal Society grant finished, Cobb spent a year and a half working at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord in Villetaneuse, where he lectured in psychophysiology.

In 1998, Cobb joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working first at its Orsay facility, utilising Drosophila maggots to study the sense of smell, and from 1995 at its Laboratoire d'Ecologie in Paris where he investigated olfactory communication in ants.

In 2007, his book The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth won the Thomson Reuters/Zoological Record Award for Communicating Zoology.

[22] In 2024 Cobb was awarded The Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society for his work documenting the history of biology as both an author and a broadcaster.