Eric Hoffman, Ph.D.

The Selection Committee for the 2018 Alton Ochsner Award Relating Tobacco Smoking and Diseases is pleased to present its 33rd Annual Award to Geoffrey T. Fong, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology and public Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, and to Eric A. Hoffman, Ph.D., Professor of Radiology, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Iowa School of Medicine, Iowa City, Iowa. Both scientists independently have made major contributions that will significantly impact their areas of research through their work and the training of other investigators. Their work related the effects of prolonged consumption of tobacco smoke on the development of malignant disease in patients. Each awardee will receive a $7,500.00 honorarium, an award medallion, and a plaque with the identifying statement attributing their research findings.

Doctor Hoffman is Professor of Radiology, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. He is Director of the Advanced Pulmonary Physiomic Imaging Laboratory (APPIL) of the Department of Radiology. Doctor Hoffman’s pioneering efforts to develop CT imaging as a quantitative tool for the assessment of structure-to-function relationships in the lung has led to his laboratory serving as the imaging center for numerous large multi-center studies focused on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Imaging methods and image analysis software developed in his laboratory have provided novel phenotypes of smoking associated lung pathology and have contributed to a growing body of highly convincing data used to understand smoking associated disease etiology and disease progression. Utilizing multi-spectral, dual energy CT to image an index of regional pulmonary perfusion, he demonstrated that the vascular response to micro-inflammatory events likely serves amongst the earliest events leading to smoking-related lung disease and may predict risk for development and progression of COPD, thus illuminating pathways for diagnosis, treatment and outcomes assessment… Continue reading.

Eric A. Hoffman, professor of radiology, biomedical engineering, and medicine, received the 2014 Joseph R. RodarteAward for Scientific Distinction May 19 at the annual international meeting of the American Thoracic Society (ATS).

The award is the highest level of distinction awarded by the Respiratory Structure and Function Assembly of the ATS.

Hoffman has spent the past 40 years as an academician developing novel new quantitative imaging methods for the study of the heart and lungs. He has been a member of the faculty at the Mayo Medical School, at the University of Pennsylvania and for the last 22 years at the University of Iowa.

He pioneered the use of non-invasive high speed x-ray computed tomography to image the three-dimensional breathing lung and beating heart. The methods developed are being used around the world to sub-divide the patient populations with chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) and asthma into sub-populations for whom improved treatments can better be targeted. His work has provided insights into the basic functioning of the lung and its altered function leading to disease states.

Together with Joseph Reinhardt, Milan Sonka and Geoffrey McLennan, Hoffman co-founded VIDA Diagnostics, a company commercializing lung image analysis software being used in a majority of government and industry sponsored studies using imaging of the lung as a means of developing and testing new interventions for lung disease.