Dr. Hoffman is the Founder and Chief Executive and Scientific Officer of Sanaria Inc., a company dedicated to developing a whole sporozoite malaria vaccine, a vaccine which won the 2014 Vaccine Industry Excellence (VIE) Award for "Best Prophylactic Vaccine," and Chairman of Protein Potential LLC, a company focused on subunit vaccine development for infectious diseases and cancer. From 1987-2001 he was Director of the Malaria Program at the Naval Medical Research Center where he and his team were leaders in subunit malaria vaccine development and sequencing of the Plasmodium falciparum genome and conducted the first studies in the world that showed that DNA vaccines elicited killer T cells in humans. In 2001 he joined Celera Genomics as Senior Vice President of Biologics where he created a program to utilize genomics and proteomics to produce biopharmaceuticals and begin the field of personalized medicine, and organized sequencing of the genome of the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae.

He has held several professorships, and chairs or serves on multiple advisory boards, is a past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and member of multiple honorific societies, authored more than 400 scientific publications, and has numerous patents. He is the most highly cited author in the world for scientific papers on malaria published between 1995 and 2005, was listed as the third most influential person in the world vaccine industry in 2015, and in 2015 received the VIE Award for Best Biotech CEO. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, MD from Cornell University Medical College (Weill), and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and did residency training at University of California San Diego. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine) in 2004.