Rate My Professor Thomas Hofmann

Prof. Dr. Thomas F. Hofmann (born 1968) is a German food chemist and academic administrator who has served as President of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since October 2019. He previously held the position of Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at TUM from 2009 to 2019. Hofmann studied food chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg from 1988 to 1992 and received his doctorate from TUM in 1995, followed by his habilitation in 1998. After serving as Acting Director of the German Food Chemistry Research Institute and as a member of the Leibniz Society, he was appointed Professor and Director of the Institute of Food Chemistry at the University of Münster in 2002. In 2007, he returned to TUM as full professor holding the Chair of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science at the TUM School of Life Sciences. His research focuses on the screening, identification, and quantification of organoleptic, bioactive, and techno-functional natural products in foodstuffs and raw materials of vegetable origin, as well as their metabolism and structure-activity relationships. He has been a member of the ZIEL Institute for Food and Health since 2007 and Co-Director of the Bavarian Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Center (BayBioMS) since 2015. Hofmann is also a Senior Visiting Professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (2015–2018) and initiated the EIT FOOD Knowledge and Innovation Community in 2016. Among his honors are the CHE University Manager of the Year award (2023), the ACS Advancement in the Application of Agricultural and Food Chemistry Award (2014), and the ACS Fellow Award (2008). He has authored or co-authored numerous publications in journals such as the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and Angewandte Chemie.