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

Neuro’s ark: Sounding out the evolution of hearing with geckos

Catherine Carr explains her discovery that geckos retain a vibration-sensing pathway previously thought to be lost when animals moved onto land.

By Helena Kudiabor
1 April 2026 | 5 min read
Magnifying glass.

Researchers retract multisensory learning paper after failed replications

Even though one set of experiments did not hold up, the authors stand by the original conclusions of the work and plan to resubmit it as a new paper.

By Calli McMurray
31 March 2026 | 4 min read
Mouse brain slices.

Cortical evolution, ZBTB18, and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 30 March.

By Jill Adams
31 March 2026 | 2 min read