1972-1973 IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose California.
1973-1974 Max Planck Institut fuer Biophysikalische Chemie, Goettingen
1974-1979 Basel Institute for Immunology
1979-present University of British Columbia
1985-1986 Los Alamos National Laboratory
BirthPlace: Hamilton, Vic. Australia
Marital Status: Married
Children: 2
Home Phone: 604-734-7521
I have developed a theory of the regulation of the immune system called the symmetrical network theory. From 1979 to 1996 I had a laboratory in the Microbiology Department of UBC that did experiments related to that theory. The theoretical work involves mathematical modelling, including simulation of the highly dimensioned system using nonlinear differential equations. An important constraint is that the system exhibits both a large memory and stability. One aspect of this work has been the recent discovery of a novel preventive HIV vaccine concept. The immune system is similar to the brain in many respects, and I have made contributions to neural network theory.
G. W. Hoffmann "Co-selection in immune network theory and in AIDS pathogenesis", Immunology and Cell Biology 228, 459-465 (1994); T. A. Kion and G. W. Hoffmann "Anti-HIV and anti-anti-MHC antibodies in alloimmune and autoimmune mice", Science 253, 1138-1140 (1991); G. W. Hoffmann, T. A. Kion and M. G. Grant "An idiotypic network model of AIDS immunopathogenesis", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA) 88, 3060-3064 (1991); M. R. Davenport and G. W. Hoffmann "A recurrent neural network using tri-state hidden neurons to orthogonalize the memory space.", International Journal of Neural Systems 1, 133-141 (1989); G. W. Hoffmann, T. A. Kion, R. B. Forsyth, K. G. Soga and A. Cooper-Willis, "The N-Dimensional Network", Theoretical Immunology, Part Two, A. S. Perelson, Ed., Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company III, 291-317 (1988).