Christof Koch, Ph.D.
CHIEF SCIENTIST
Christof Koch, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientist at Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. Koch provides leadership in developing and implementing the Foundation’s overall scientific strategy.
Koch earned a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a Professor of Biology and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, he directed a laboratory studying the physical basis of computation in the brain.
After 25 years at Caltech, Koch became the Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading a 10-year effort in systems neuroscience. In 2015, he became the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, overseeing the institute’s growth to more than 300 scientists, engineers, and staff. During this time, the institute focused on two large-scale programs: cataloging the thousand or more distinct types of brain cells in mice and humans and building Brain Observatories to record the activity of neurons in behaving animals.
Since 2021, Koch has served as Chief Scientist at both the Allen Institute’s MindScope Program and the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. In the latter role, he seeks to understand how the physical substrate of consciousness in the brain determines and constrains what and how we perceive the world—a phenomenon called the Perception Box—and to develop techniques to expand these constraints.
Koch has authored more than 300 scientific articles and written five books. His latest is The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t be Computed.