Gerd Sommerhoff

Who was Gerd Sommerhoff?

Gerd Walter Christian Sommerhoff OBE was a pioneer of theoretical neuroscience and a noted humanist.

A great-grandson of the German composer Robert Schumann, he was living in England at the onset of the Second World War. As a foreign national, he spent at least two years in an internment camp in Canada before returning to England where he took up a post teaching science at the Dragon School in Oxford. While there, he developed what was really an early form of CBT without computers, using boxes of numbered cards, containing questions, answers, tutorial material, or descriptions of experiments, on a variety of different subjects.

Sommerhoff later became a Research Fellow in Systems Theory at University College, London. In parallel with this position, he taught technology at Sevenoaks School. In 1984, he retired from teaching and moved to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Some of his students were Tim Hunt, John Paul Morrison, and Richard Veryard.