Chris Petkov
Background
Sometimes the route taken is more interesting that the destination. I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. My father defected to the United States in 1984. Happy to tell anybody how over a drink. Neuroscience sucked me in when I was a pre-doctoral student in Mortimer Mishkin’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S.A.. At the NIH, I helped Jonathan Fritz and Richard Saunders with the auditory recognition memory project. Following Jonathan's guidance, I subsequently completed my doctoral work with Mitch Sutter at the University of California at Davis, where I used illusions and electrophysiological recordings from neurons to study how the brain stabilizes sound in natural settings; (how else do we ever hope to have any sort of a conversation in a pub?).
Gregg Recanzone, Ken Britten, David Woods and Michael Merzenich were on my PhD committee and were impervious to bribes. As a PhD student I was also doing quite a bit of "moonlighting" (collaboration was my excuse to Mitch) in the labs of Kathy Baynes (dyslexia collaboration), David Woods (human audio-visual selective attention and fMRI), and William Jagust (on MRI markers of cognitive decline in the elderly). All of these projects were successful in part because of the wonderful people I was working with, and in part because of our sheer unwavering drive to solve only difficult problems. These collaborations and my work with my advisor Mitch allowed me early on to develop my use of cutting-edge imaging and neurophysiology techniques to understand both normal and impaired brain function.
Following this I went to the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany with Nikos Logothetis, to bring the human and animal work closer together by way of fMRI. Nikos was and continues to be tremendously supportive and because of that I tried to be as productive as possible on all fronts, including having with my wife Amanda two wonderful kids Julian (2004) and Maya (2007) at the Frauen Klinik in Tuebingen.
In the fall of 2008, I joined the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University in England, where my laboratory seems to continue to tackle only the questions that are extremely difficult to answer. Our goal is to contribute to understanding the neurophysiology of communication and to impact on the treatment options for the perceptual and cognitive deficits of communication disorders.
Previous Positions
California State University, Chico - B.A. in Psychology
University of California, Davis - Ph.D. in Systems Neuroscience
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics - Post-Doc with Nikos Logothetis (2004-2008)
Informal Interests
Road cycling and fighting the North Sea with a windsurfer. Reading anything by Bill Bryson.
