Simon Baron-Cohen

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 (www.autismresearchcentre.com). 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 author of Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995), The Essential Difference (Penguin UK/Basic Books, 2003), 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 and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts (OUP, 2008), 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) and The Transporters (www.thetransporters.com, 2007), an animation for preschool children with autism to help them learn emotion recognition. Both of these were nominated for BAFTA awards.

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. For 2007 he was President of the Psychology Section of the BA, Vice President of the National Autistic Society, and received the 2006 Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge from the BPS. For 2009 he is Vice President of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). He is Patron of several autism and disability charities (Autism Anglia, Red2Blue, Autism Yorkshire, and Speaking Up). He is a Fellow of the BPS, the British Academy, and the Association for Psychological Science, and co-editor in chief of the new journal Molecular Autism. His current research is testing the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism at the neural, endocrine and genetic levels.