Christof Koch

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.

Contents

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


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