Background
He was the son of Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and the younger brother of Werner Creutzfeldt, a professor of internal medicine.
He was the son of Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt and the younger brother of Werner Creutzfeldt, a professor of internal medicine.
Creutzfeldt attended the gymnasium (high school) in Kiel. At university he first studied the humanities, but soon switched to medicine, and obtained his Doctor of Medicine
A remarkable career made Creutzfeldt a renowned researcher at Freiburg University in Germany in 1953. From 1953 and 1959 he was an assistant and trainee in physiology with Professor Hoffmann (Freiburg), in psychiatry with Professor
Miiller (Bern), and in neurophysiology and neurology with Professor
Jung (Freiburg). He continued to work for two years as a research anatomist at University of California, Los Angeles Medical School before moving to the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where he stayed from 1962 to 1971. Creutzfeldt obtained there his degree in clinical neurophysiology (University of Munich).
In 1971 he became one of the nine directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, as head of the Department of Neurobiology. Creutzfeldt had a profound impact on neuroscience, in particular in Germany, for he had an unusually large number of pupils who held chairs in German universities, Max Planck Institutes and, Leibniz Institutes.
From 1992 a lecture is given yearly, and from 1999 biennial, by distinguished scientists to his honour at the University of Göttingen during the Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society ("").
1992 Bert Sakmann, Recordings of excitatory and inhibitory currents from visual cortex neurons: An effort lasting 25 years
1993 Heinz Wässle, Vision in darkness: The rod circuit of the mammalian retina
1994 Wolf Singer, The putative role of response synchronization in neocortical processing
1995 Henning Scheich, Auditory cortex: pattern analyzer and interpreter
1996 Klaus-Peter Hoffmann, Evolution of motion perception and slow eye movement control in mammals
1997 Semir Zeki, The conscious vision of the blind and the modularity of consciousness
1998 Terry Sejnowski, Computational neurobiology of sleep, and by Eric Kandel, Genes, synapses and long-term memory
1999 Gerhard Neuweiler, Hearing in echolocating bats, a paradigm for mammalian audition? 2003 Eckart O. Altenmüller, From Laetoli to Carnegie: musician"s brains and neuroplasticity
2007 Uwe Heinemann, Cellular mechanisms of memory consolidation in the hippocampal formation
2009 Atsushi Iriki, Neuroscience of Primate Intellectual Evolution
2011 January Born, The memory function of sleep
2013 Hannelore Ehrenreich, Shifting paradigms in neuropsychiatry
2015 Sabine Kastner, Perceptual and cognitive functions of the thalamus.