Allen Institute CEO and leadership

Allan Jones is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute, an independent, nonprofit research organization dedicated to answering some of the biggest questions in bioscience and advancing our knowledge to improve human health. Researchers at the Allen Institute study the unknowns of biology with major efforts in the brain, the cell and the immune system.

Jones was one of the Allen Institute’s four founding employees when the nonprofit launched in 2003, originally as the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and took the helm within the first few years to manage its growth and impact, eventually leading the launch of the Institute’s other three scientific divisions. Along with the Allen Institute’s founder, the late philanthropist Paul G. Allen, Jones pioneered a unique approach to neuroscience, and later to other areas of bioscience, through the Institute’s core principles of big science, team science and open science. Jones has continued to champion the need for open data sharing and the broader importance of open science.

Jones’ publications have garnered approximately 1,000 highly influential citations on Semantic Scholar. His 2011 TED Talk: “A map of the brain” has been viewed nearly 1.25 million times. He has advised and helped organize many current U.S. and global neuroscience initiatives, including the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, the Human Brain Project and the International Brain Initiative. Jones currently serves on several advisory boards and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Board of Trustees, and he is the former Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Neuroscience and Behavior.

Originally from Wichita, Kansas, Jones received a B.S. in biology from Duke University and a Ph.D. in genetics and developmental biology from Washington University School of Medicine. After a brief period as a post doc at the University of Pennsylvania, Jones joined Avitech Diagnostics, a small start-up company in Philadelphia. He moved to Seattle to work for Rosetta Inpharmatics, which was later acquired by Merck and Co.

Christof received his baccalaureate from the Lycée Descartes in Rabat, Morocco, his B.S. and M.S. in physics from the University of Tübingen in Germany and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck Institute for biological Cybernetics in 1982. Subsequently, he spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1987 until 2013, Koch was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, from his initial appointment as Assistant Professor, Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 1986, to his final position as Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology. See here for Christof's academic pedigree and his students. Christof joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science as Chief Scientific Officer in 2011 and became President in 2015.

Christof’s passion are neurons - the atoms of perception, memory, behavior and consciousness - their diverse shapes, electrical behaviors, and their computational function within the mammalian brain, in particular in neocortex. The Allen Institute for Brain Science is engaged in a major effort to identify all the different types of neurons in the brains of mice and humans - the cell census effort. See the papers below.

Christof discovered that in vivo cortical neurons do not integrate over large number of small inputs given their spiking variability, how neurons can multiply, the relationship between intra- and extra-cellular potential, and how this gives rise to the local field potential and the large-scale current sinks and sources and how weak extracellular fields can entrain spiking activity via ephaptic effects. He postulated the attentional saliency map hypothesis for biological and computer vision according to which one or more topographic organized spatial maps summarize bottom-up salient information in the visual system, he co-discovered, with Itzhak Fried, an high-level, invariant and abstract single neuron representation of familiar individuals and objects in the human medial temporal lobe (the so-called “Jennifer Aniston” or concept neurons) and developed the ‘continuous flashed suppression’ masking technique. In collaboration with Francis Crick, he initiated the modern search for the neuronal correlates of consciousness, a systematic experimental program to identify the minimal bio-physical mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious percept. In collaboration with Giulio Tononi, he co-developed the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness.