Exploring cortex in an open access and high throughput manner

Prof. Christof Koch (Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute for Brain Science, USA) explains how a privately funded initiative with a culture between a university and a biotech startup is bringing free, exploitable data to the entire community and demonstrating the benefits of ‘pre-competitive level’ data-sharing.

About speaker:
Prof. Christof Koch has dedicated his life to researching neuroscience, having spent 25 years at the California Institute of Technology as a Professor in Biology and Engineering. In 2011, Dr. Koch left academia to join the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating resources to fuel discovery among researchers worldwide and to advance the scientific community's understanding of the brain in health and disease. He is leading a 10-year, large-scale, high throughput effort to build brain observatories to map, analyse, and understand the cerebral cortex.

Prof. Koch has authored more than 300 scientific papers and articles, eight patents, and five books concerned with the way neurons process information and the neuronal and computational basis of visual perception, selective attention, and consciousness. Together with his long-time collaborator, Francis Crick, Prof. Koch pioneered the scientific study of consciousness. His latest book is Consciousness—Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.