Christof Koch

Christof Koch (born November 13, 1956, Kansas City) is an American neuroscientist educated in North Africa and Europe. He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in 1982. 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. From 2000 to 2005 he was the executive officer of the Computation and Neural Systems 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 this endeavour was the late Francis Crick. He was the local organiser 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