Donald D. Hoffman is Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, Irvine and author of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See and coauthor of Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory Of Perception.
He received the Troland Research Prize of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Early Career Award of the American Psychological Association. He earned his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in Quantitative Psychology, and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computational Psychology.
His research interests include Vision, Cognitive Science, Consciousness, and Evolutionary Models of Perception. Hoffman has worked as a project engineer at the Hughes Aircraft Company and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hoffman has continued to develop a mathematical model of consciousness, and has used that model to solve the “combination problem” of consciousness.
In addition to his positions at UC Irvine, Hoffman has been a guest lecturer at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung at Universität Bielefeld in Germany (The Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University). He has received awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Chopra Foundation, and from the students of UC Irvine. Hoffman has also been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Foundation, the Faggin Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Defence.