Christof Koch
Born in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco. He studied physics and philosophy and was awarded his Ph.D. in biophysics. In 1987, Koch joined the California Institute of Technology and eventually became Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology. After a quarter of a century, he left academia for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where he is now Chief Scientist of the MindScope Program. Christof’s passions are neurons—the atoms of perception, memory, behavior and consciousness—and their diverse shapes, electrical behaviors, and computational function within the mammalian brain, in particular in neocortex. Koch has authored more than 300 scientific papers and five books concerned with the way computers and neurons process information and the neuronal and computational basis of visual perception. Together with his longtime collaborator, Francis Crick, Koch pioneered the scientific study of consciousness. His latest book, The Feeling of Life Itself—Why Consciousness is Everywhere But Can’t be Computed, was published in 2019.
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