Biography
Dr. Christof Koch has been teaching at the California Institute of
Technology since 1986. Prior to that he spent four years at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
His laboratory, K-Lab, focuses on experimental and computational
research pertaining to the biophysics and neurophysiology of neurons,
and the neuronal correlates of selective visual attention, awareness
and consciousness in the mammalian brain. For over 16 years, he
collaborated with the late Dr. Francis Crick on discovering the
neuronal correlates of consciousness in the primate brain. This
research has made its way into a book for a general scientific
audience, The Quest for Consciousness. The book
discusses the Crick-Koch framework for how consciousness, the
subjective mind, arises out of the flickering interactions within the
neurons of the cerebral cortex and related structures. His research on
understanding the biophysical mechanisms underlying computation at the
level of synapses, channels, and membranes has led to the book: Biophysics of Computation.
He has co-edited several collections: Methods in Neuronal Modeling, Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, and Visual Attention and Cortical Circuits.
He has authored over one hundred technical articles on
neuroscience, and has numerous patents in the area of analog VLSI
vision chips (smart vision chips). He is associated with the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and loves to climb mountains.
Dr. Koch studied physics and philosophy at the University of
Tübingen in West Germany. He was awarded his Ph.D. in biophysics (minor
in Philosophy) from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
in Tübingen in 1982 (under Profs. Valentin Braitenberg and Tomaso
Poggio).
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