Christof Koch

Christof Koch (born 1956 in Kansas City) is a German-American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. His research sits at the boundary between neurobiology, computation and the philosophy of mind, and he has done much to make the study of conscious experience a matter of empirical investigation.

Koch trained in Germany, earning his PhD in 1982 at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen for work on nonlinear information processing. After several years at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he joined the California Institute of Technology in 1986 and taught there until 2013. With Shimon Ullman he proposed the idea of a visual saliency map, and with his student Laurent Itti he later developed saliency algorithms that became widely used.

His long collaboration with Francis Crick, beginning in 1990, focused on finding the neural correlates of consciousness. With Nao Tsuchiya he devised continuous flash suppression, a method for keeping images invisible for many seconds, which they used to argue that selective attention and consciousness are distinct processes. Later he worked closely with the psychiatrist Giulio Tononi on Integrated Information Theory, and he defends a modern form of panpsychism.

Since 2011 he has been chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where he led large projects cataloguing cell types and modelling brain activity in mice. His influence also reaches the public through his column in Scientific American Mind and through summer courses in computational neuroscience that he helped found and that still run today.