Marcin Maciej Hoffmann (born October 2, 1972, in Godziesze Wielkie) is a Polish scientist and entrepreneur. He is a professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Chemistry of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
Early years
Hoffmann was born in 1972 in Godziesze Wielkie, a small town near Kalisz. He attended No. 30 Primary School in Poznań and the Karol Marcinkowski High School in Poznań; at that time, he succeeded as a laureate of Polish Physics Olympiad and twice as a laureate of Polish Chemistry Olympiad. In 1996, he was awarded the MSc in Chemistry title at the Faculty of Chemistry of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; his thesis Theoretical analysis of selected (R,R)-tartaric acid derivatives, supervised by Jacek Rychlewski, was awarded the first prize in Faculty's Contest for the best MSc dissertation of that year. In 1997, he achieved MSc in Biotechnology at the AMU Faculty of Biology for his thesis Properties of glycoproteins isolated from Chelidonium majus milky sap, supervised by Anna Goździcka-Józefiak. During his MSc courses he won a number of various scholarships, including ones granted by the Minister of National Education. and the Stefan Batory Foundation, he was also the President of Student Council at the AMU Faculty of Chemistry. In 2000, he defended his PhD thesis in chemistry, Effects of substitution of hydroxyl group by fluorine atom - ab initio and DFT studies (under the supervision of Rychlewski), rewarded with the first prize in annual Faculty's Contest for the best PhD dissertation. He also completed an MBA degree, organized jointly by Poznań Academy of Economics and Georgia State University in Atlanta in 2000 (with Henryk Mruk as the tutor of his managerial project) and postgraduate studies in computer science at the AMU Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in 2004.
Academic career
Already during his MSc course, Hoffmann took an academic internship at the University of Oxford under Dr John M. Brown. Upon receiving his PhD degree, he was employed as assistant professor at the AMU Faculty of Chemistry; in 2001–2002, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, where he conducted research under the supervision of Keiji Morokuma, a globally recognized expert in quantum chemistry. As a young scientist, he was awarded a number of scholarships by various institutions, such as the Foundation for Polish Science and the Centre for Applied Wave Mechanics (Centre de Mécanique Ondulatoire Appliquée). He defended his habilitation thesis Quantum-chemical calculations in molecular modelling of selected systems of importance in chemistry, biochemistry, and medicine in 2009 and became an associate professor two years later. On March 8, 2017, at the age of 44, he was conferred the professor title by Andrzej Duda, the President of the Republic of Poland.
Scientific activity
Hoffmann's research focuses on the application of computational methods of quantum chemistry in the investigation of the structure of molecules and the interactions between them, as well as modelling of enzymatic reactions along with designing novel drugs and chemical compounds of desirable activity with the use of computational models built for this purpose. The results of his scientific research include: