Headshot of Kevin Mitchell.

Kevin Mitchell

Associate professor of genetics and neuroscience
Trinity College Dublin

Kevin Mitchell is associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. He studies the genetics of brain wiring and its relevance to variation in human faculties, psychiatric disease and perceptual conditions such as synesthesia. His current research focuses on the biology of agency and the nature of genetic and neural information.

Mitchell completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the genetic instructions that direct the development of the nervous system in the fruit fly, and his postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, exploring the same topic in mice. He is the author of “Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are” and “Free agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.” He also writes the Wiring the Brain blog and is on X (formerly known as Twitter) @WiringtheBrain.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

New catalog charts familial ties from autism to 90 other conditions

The research tool reveals associations stretching across three generations.

By Charles Q. Choi
17 October 2024 | 4 min read
Illustration of three columns of text with certain passages underlined and circled.

This paper changed my life: ‘Spontaneous cortical activity reveals hallmarks of an optimal internal model of the environment,’ from the Fiser Lab

Fiser’s work taught me how to think about grounding computational models in biologically plausible implementations.

By Megan Peters
16 October 2024 | 5 min read
Research image of brain scans showing the density of neuronal synapses.

SYNGAP1; executive function; synaptic density

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 14 October.

By Jill Adams
15 October 2024 | 2 min read