Christof Koch

Christof Koch
Christof Koch, 2008
Born	November 13, 1956 (1956-11-13) (age 54) Kansas City, Missouri
Nationality	American
Fields	Biophysics
Alma mater	University of Tübingen Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Doctoral advisor	Valentin Braitenberg Tomaso Poggio
Doctoral students	Laurent Itti, Virgil Griffith

Christof Koch (born November 13, 1956, Kansas City) is an American neuroscientist working on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1986. In early 2011, he also became the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their high through-put, large scale cortical coding project.

He is the son of German parents; his father was a diplomat. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school in Morocco. He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in 1982. He then worked for four years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. In 1986, he joined the newly started Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at Caltech.

He has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that consciousness can now be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology. His primary collaborator in the endeavour of locating the neural correlates of consciousness was the late Francis Crick.

Together with James Bower, he founded in 1988 the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, which remains ongoing. In 1993, he founded, together with Rodney Douglas and Terrence Sejnowski, the Neuromorphic Engineering Summer School in Telluride, Colorado, which remains ongoing.

Koch was the executive officer of the Computation and Neural Systems program at Caltech from 2000 to 2005. In 2005 he was the local organizer of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting.

Miscellaneous Trivia

• After his dog died he became a vegetarian, and has expressed sympathy for animal rights due to the neurological similarities between human and non-human animals.^[1]
• He has an apple logo tattooed on his right deltoid and a drawing from Ramon y Cajal of a cortical microcircuit tattooed on his left deltoid.
• He has an Erdős number of three.^[2]
• He is allergic to strawberries.

Publications

• Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons, Oxford U. Press, (1999), ISBN 0-19-518199-9
• The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach, Roberts and Co., (2004), ISBN 0-9747077-0-8

References

1. ^ Miscellaneous Things, accessed 21 March 2009
2. ^ Miscellaneous Things, accessed 21 March 2009

External links

• Homepage of Christof Koch
• Homepage of Koch's laboratory
• His book The Quest for Consciousness
• Online lecture videos from an undergraduate course taught by Christof Koch at Caltech in 2003 on the neurobiological basis of consciousness.
• Neural Correlates of Consciousness, Scholarpedia article by Christof Koch
• Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
• Radio interview with Christof Koch and Francis Crick, 2001
• Radio interview with Christof Koch and Constanze Hofstoetter, 2005
• Interview on the Brain Science Podcast, 2007
• Christof Koch, a short clip
• Interview with Christof Koch on the neuroscience of reading and the movie in your mind

Persondata
Name	Koch, Christof
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	November 13, 1956
Place of birth	Kansas City, Missouri
Date of death
Place of death