A lifelong quest to unravel consciousnes
Official CV
I’m a scholar and scientist best known for my experiments and writings exploring the brain and consciousness. As my parents were German diplomats, I had an itinerant but happy childhood, living in many cities in America, Africa, Europe, and Asia; I still retain a distinct Teutonic accent. Trained as a physicist in Germany, I worked for four years at MIT before becoming a professor of biology and engineering at Caltech in Pasadena, one of the nation’s most preeminent science schools. I spent 27 productive years in its ivory tower. In 2011, Paul Allen, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, recruited me as Chief Scientist to the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, leading a massive ten-year effort in systems neuroscience. Subsequently, I became the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, overseeing the institute’s growth to more than 300 scientists, engineers, and staff. At the beginning of the pandemic, I stepped down to focus on leading the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute. Simultaneously, I became Chief Scientist of Elizabeth Koch’s Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity.
I’ve been the advisor of about 50 PhD graduate students and 60 post-doctoral fellows, the co-author of >300 academic articles, cited > 140,000 times, and the sole author of four academic books (with Oxford and MIT University Press) on biophysics, cortex and consciousness and write regularly for a variety of magazines (Scientific American,Technology Review, Wall Street Journal) and speak on many pod-casts.
Unofficial CV
Read here an excerpt from an autobiographical chapter of Christof Koch's book "Consciousness - Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" (MIT Press, 2011), first published in 2011: