Christof Koch

Christof Koch (born November 13, 1956, Kansas City) is an American neuroscientist working on the neural basis of consciousness. He currently holds the position of Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1986. He is co-founder of the company "Eye-Predict" which attempts to aid in advertising by predicting eye-movements for given photos.^[1]

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He is the son of German parents; his father was a diplomat. He went to 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 at MIT.

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.

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

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. ^ Welche Ameise versteht schon Einstein? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 May 2007. (German)