Christoph Schreiner is a German-American neuroscientist and Professor of Otolaryngology at the University of California, San Francisco. His research on the functional organization of central auditory stations of the mammalian brain has elucidated the encoding of complex sounds, such as speech and communication signals, in normal and hearing-impaired models. He is best known for his pioneering work to describe the response properties and topographical organization of neurons in the mammalian auditory cortex. He is the recipient of the 2022 Association for Research in Otolaryngology Award of Merit ^[1].

Christoph grew up in Northern Germany, where frequent trips into the woods fostered a love for nature. His favorite subject in school was biology, but when he selected a professional field for training, his other passion for more quantitative and physical sciences steered him into studying physics at the University of Göttingen in 1969. He worked under the tutelage of Prof. Manfred R. Schroeder, who was renowned for using innovative applications of math to various acoustics problems in the real-world relating to speech, hearing, and concert hall acoustics. In fact, Christoph’s first exposure to modulation transfer functions and auditory psychophysics came while he completed his physics Masters and Doctoral theses, setting Christoph on a road to using rigorous quantitative methods in the hearing sciences. Along the way, Christoph enrolled in medical school to learn human physiology, since he became convinced that psychophysical phenomena had to be understood in the context of both the biophysics and physiology of the sensory system.

In 1977, with a fresh physics PhD in hand, Christoph embarked on actual physiological studies of the auditory system in his first postdoc at the Max Planck Institute lab of Prof. Otto Creutzfeldt – an early pioneer in higher order visual neurophysiology who wanted to expand into audition. It was there – while he completed a doctoral thesis in Medicine – that Christoph published his first highly cited paper, on the “Thalamocortical transformation of responses to complex auditory stimuli” in 1980.

After the completion of his training in 1980, Christoph was offered the chance to lead the Auditory Group at Max Planck, though he was encouraged by Prof. Creutzfeldt to first do a short postdoctoral stint in California before returning to Germany to take the reigns. It was there that he first teamed up with Michael Merzenich to help develop a multi-channel cochlear implant, and what was envisioned as a one-year fellowship wound up as a 30 year collaborative partnership that produced several canonical works on the organization of sound feature representations in the cortex, as well as the mechanisms and therapeutic applications of cortical plasticity.

Functional cortical organization

Functional midbrain and thalamus organization

Cortical plasticity

Complex auditory receptive fields

Hearing impairment effects in cortex

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