Simon Baron-Cohen (born July 23, 1959) is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.. He is best known for his work on autism, including his early theory that autism involves degrees of "mindblindness" (or delays in the development of theory of mind); and his later theory that autism is an extreme form of the "male brain", which involved a reconceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathizing–systemizing theory.

Baron-Cohen has an MA degree in Human Sciences from New College, Oxford, where he was supervised by Peter Bryant and Richard Dawkins. He has a PhD in Psychology from University College London under the supervision of Uta Frith and an M.Phil. in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Baron-Cohen studied his PhD with Uta Frith and was a co-author of the first study to show that children with autism have delays in the development of a theory of mind (ToM) (Cognition, 1985),. A ToM is held to be fundamental to being human, enabling flexible social interaction, communication and empathy.