Dr. Kevin J. Mitchell

Associate Professor, Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin

Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the Smurfit Institute of Genetics in Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. He is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin (B.A., Mod. 1991) and received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1997), where he studied neural development with Prof. Corey Goodman. He did postdoctoral research with Prof. Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Prof. Bill Skarnes at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, using molecular genetics to study neural development in the mouse. Since 2002 he has been on the faculty at Trinity College Dublin. He has also been an EMBO Young Investigator and was elected to Fellowship of Trinity College in 2009.

He blogs at Wiring the Brain.

Surprising Science

Wiring the Brain: How Viruses Can Be Engineered to Trace Neural Connections

The fact that the rabies virus can spread from an infected neuron to other neurons connected to it makes it an almost perfect vector for tracing connections in the brain.