Christof Koch

Christof Koch
CalTech
Pasadena, USA

Speaker of Workshop 4a

Will talk about: Modeling and recording from neurons in the human brain

Bio sketch:

Born in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycèe Descartes. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1982. After four years at MIT, Dr. Koch joined Caltech in 1986, where he is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology. In 2011, he became the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle to lead a large scale, focused and high-throughout, ten year effort to understand coding in the visual neocortex. He loves dogs, Apple Computers, rock-climbing, trailing running in the mountains and biking.

The author of more than three hundred scientific papers and journal articles, patents and books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with Francis Crick, with whom he worked for 16 years, he is one of the pioneers of the neurobiological approach to consciousness.

His latest book is Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press, 2012).