Simon Baron-Cohen

Director of Autism Research Centre
Cambridge University

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge. He holds degrees in Human Sciences from New College, Oxford, a PhD in Psychology from UCL, and an M.Phil in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry. He held lectureships in both of these departments in London before moving to Cambridge in 1994. He is also Director of CLASS (Cambridge Lifespan Asperger Syndrome Service), a clinic for adults with suspected AS.

He is author of Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995), The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Penguin UK/Basic Books, 2003), Zero Degrees of Empathy (Penguin UK, 2011, and published under The Science of Evil by Basic Books, US), and Prenatal Testosterone in Mind (MIT Press, 2005). He has edited a number of scholarly anthologies, including Understanding Other Minds (OUP, 1993, 2001), The Maladapted Mind (Erlbaum, 1997) and Synaesthesia (Blackwells, 1997).

He has also written books for parents and teachers such as Autism: The Facts (OUP, 1993), Tourette Syndrome: The Facts (OUP, 1998), and Teaching children with autism to mind read (Wiley, 1998). He is author of the DVD-ROM Mind Reading: an interactive guide to emotions (Jessica Kingsley Ltd, 2003) that was nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Off-Line Learning.

He has been awarded prizes from the American Psychological Association, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), and the British Psychological Society (BPS) for his research into autism. He has been President of the Psychology Section of the BA, Vice President of the International Society for Autism Research, and the National Autistic Society, and received the 2006 Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge from the BPS. His current research is testing the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism at the neural, endocrine and genetic levels.

Simon Baron-Cohen is an Editor-in-Chief of the online open access journal Molecular Autism.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior

Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

By Claudia López Lloreda
27 June 2025 | 9 min listen

Authors correct image errors in Neuron paper that challenged microglia-to-neuron conversion

The issue with the supplementary figures likely does not change the conclusions of the paper, according to an outside expert.

By Shaena Montanari
26 June 2025 | 3 min read

Building a climate neuroscience subfield: Q&A with Angie Michaiel

Michaiel, a program officer at the Kavli Foundation, shares what it took to cultivate research on the relationship between climate change and the nervous system.

By Calli McMurray
26 June 2025 | 5 min read