Dr. Paul Hofmann, Partner and Chief Technology Officer

Paul Hofmann, PhD is a board member at Primal. Primal provides Internet consumers, publishers and developers with an interest network that filters Web content based on individual interests. He also serves as an advisory board member to the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University.

Paul was the Chief Technology Officer at Saffon Technology from 2012 to September 2014.

Before joining Saffron Paul was Vice President Research at SAP Labs at Palo Alto.  SAP is the world’s largest business software company. Paul was also Director of the SAP Corporate Venturing Group. Prior to joining SAP in 2001, Paul was Senior Plant Manager at BASF’s Global Catalysts Business Unit in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

Paul was Visiting Scientist at Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT, Cambridge, MA 2009.

His background is entrenched in research as Senior Scientist and Assistant Professor at outstanding European and American Universities (Northwestern University, U.S., Munich Institute of Technology, Germany and Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany) and he is an expert in computer simulations and graphics (Ph.D., research and teaching in Nonlinear Quantum Dynamics and Chaos Theory), authoring numerous publications and books, including a book on SCM and environmental information systems as well as performance management and productivity of supply chains.

Paul joined SAP 2001 as Director Global Strategic Supply Chain Management Initiative. His pre-sales team designed and rolled out the SCM Value Based Selling Approach for EMEA and supported many crucial Supply Chain sales for SAP in EMEA.

Prior to joining SAP, he was Senior Plant Manager at BASF’s Global Catalysts Business Unit in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

After joining BASF 1989 Paul headed the development of object-oriented production planning and scheduling software for BASF's plants in the IT division of BASF. He designed a Computer Integrated Manufacturing System for BASF. He led the team that implemented the OO design in C++ and Small Talk; one of the first big object oriented software projects in German industry.

Paul led the implementation of SAP R/3 for BASF Intermediary Division.

During his research at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL in the 80s, he did molecular simulations to explain molecular beam reactions. He used the Cray supercomputers extensively for this work and collaborated with Sir John Pople (Nobel Prize Laureate).

At Munich Institute of Technology, Germany Paul used Associative Memory Systems -AMS- (Neuronal Networks) to predict chemical reactions in mass spectrographs.

Paul studied Chemistry and Physics at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received a Bachelor in biotechnology and a master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Vienna.

He did his Ph.D.in Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany where he graduated in 1986.

At Darmstadt he wrote SW for the design of molecules (drugs) using computer graphics. He was part of the MOLCAD team that developed SW for Silicon Graphics. His thesis is on non-linear quantum dynamics and chaos theory.