Headshot of Mary Doherty.

Mary Doherty

Consultant anaesthetist
Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan, Ireland

Mary Doherty is an autistic consultant anesthesiologist based in Ireland, an honorary clinical research fellow at Brighton & Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom, and a Ph.D. student at London South Bank University. She is also the mother of two neurodivergent young people.

Doherty is founder of Autistic Doctors International and Autistic Med Students, both dedicated to peer support, advocacy, research and training. She has been involved with biomedical autism research for several years, as a member of the AIMS-2-Trials Autism Representatives Steering Committee and more recently the Participatory Research Advisory Committee for the RESPECT 4 Neurodevelopment Network.

Her research interests include health care for autistic adults and the experiences of autistic medical students and doctors. Her doctoral research focuses on the experiences and perspectives of autistic psychiatrists.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of folded origami.

Dimensionality—neuroscience’s red herring?

Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality, or treating it as an end-all quantification of some aspect of neural computation, may hinder progress in understanding the brain.

By Matthew Perich
7 September 2026 | 8 min read
Monkeys at Dutch primate center.

Dutch primate center awaits October animal research debate

Science is forging ahead at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands, following a reversal of last year’s mandate to phase out primate studies. But researchers aren’t sure how long the reprieve will last.

By Lauren Schenkman
2 September 2026 | 5 min read

When we sleep, our brain is filled with spontaneous neural activity. What is it doing?

Daniel Levenstein explains how internally generated brain activity during sleep shapes our cognition, and why NeuroAI is such a powerful approach to understanding the brain.

By Paul Middlebrooks
2 September 2026 | 96 min listen