Headshot of Eric Kandel.

Eric Kandel

University professor emeritus
Columbia University

Eric R. Kandel is university professor emeritus and professor emeritus of physiology and cellular biophysics, psychiatry, biochemistry, molecular biophysics and neuroscience at Columbia University. He is founding co-director of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, founding director of Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science, and Sagol Professor Emeritus of Brain Science at the Zuckerman Institute. He was also a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1984 to 2022. In 2000, Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of learning and memory. He has been awarded 24 honorary degrees. Kandel is the author of “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” (2006), “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present” (2012), “Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures” (Columbia, 2016), “The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves” (2018), and “There Is Life After the Nobel Prize” (Columbia, 2022). He is also a co-author of “Principles of Neural Science” (2021), the standard textbook in the field of neuroscience.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Clockwise: lab mouse, zebrafish, octopus, rat pushing a cube, nematodes, fruit fly.

The term ‘model organism’ should be reserved for biological systems

By referring to artificial neural networks as model organisms, we run the risk of distorting funding priorities and disregard the explanatory power of a shared evolutionary history across biological organisms.

By Marc Coutanche
13 November 2026 | 6 min read

New phase of BRAIN Initiative spawns basal ganglia ‘parts list’

With a standardized cell naming system and infrastructure for data collection and analysis, the basal ganglia project sets the stage for a whole-brain primate atlas.

By Claudia López Lloreda
12 November 2026 | 1 min watch
Research image showing genes containing microexons in mice.

Machine-learning model spots autism-linked variants that scramble splicing

The model provides a way to investigate genetic variation in regions of the genome whose functions have been difficult to interpret.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
12 November 2026 | 4 min read