On Thursday, the 24th of October 2019, Christoph successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the “Neural Correlates of Intelligence and General Knowledge Derived by Magnetic Resonance Imaging”. Christoph’s thesis is in many ways unique. While there are several studies on the neural foundations of fluid intelligence, there is practically no such study on the brain fundaments of crystallized intelligence. Christoph’s thesis introduces the reader with a fantastic clarity through the history and present status of the psychology and the neuroscience of intelligence research, to then develop his own way of studying this field. In 324 (yes: 324!) subjects he collects state-of-the-art functional and imaging data and scrutinizes the knowledge base and fluid intelligence of his subjects. He can show that fluid intelligence is equal in both sexes, but that men churn out their fluid intelligence by grey matter volume, while women do it with a highly efficient functional connectivity. For crystallized intelligence, however, women score lower than men, due to differences in structural connectivity. In the next study he uses NODDI to reconstruct the cellular geometry of grey matter and can show that dendritic morphology that derives from efficient synaptic pruning correlates with IQ. This study, that was published in Nature Communications, was among the 0.02% most publicly discussed scientific papers of the last years. Finally, Christoph reconstructs the connectional fundaments of fluid intelligence by the using the functional connectome of the human brain. The committee consisting of Onur Güntürkün, Nikolai Axmacher, Oliver Wolf, and Boris Suchan was deeply impressed and awarded this grand work with a magna cum laude.

Congratulations Christoph! We are very proud of you.