Christoph von der Malsburg obtained his PhD with a topic in elementary particle physics at CERN, Geneva, and the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1970. He then joined the Section Neurobiology of the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen until he became, in 1987, Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, Physics and Psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 1990 he founded Institute for Neural Computation at Ruhr-Universtity Bochum. In 2007, when he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies as Senior Fellow.
He co-founded three companies and received a number of awards (Pioneer Award 1994 of the Neural Network Council of the IEEE, Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation Award 1998, Koerber-Award for European Science 2000, Hebb Award 2003 of the International Neural Network Society), he acted as President of the European Neural Network Society 1995–1996, is Fellow of the International Neural Network Society and co-editor of several journals.
His research interests are focused on processes of organization in the brain with emphasis on the structure and function of the visual system. His early publications concerning the theory of self-organization of regular fiber projections in the visual system made him a pioneer of this field. He is also known for his criticism of the theory of neural networks according to which the generally accepted view suffers of the binding problem. To solve it he formulated the Dynamic Link Architecture, a system of rapidly switching net fragments, as applied for instance to face recognition.