About
Matthew J. Hoffman is a Professor of Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York, where he has been on the faculty since 2011. His research centers on mathematical modeling of the fate and transport of plastic pollution in the Laurentian Great Lakes and the global ocean, including the first full-system estimates of plastic input and floating mass in the Great Lakes. His group also works on data assimilation, lake and ocean hydrodynamics, remote sensing and hyperspectral vehicle tracking, and cardiac electrical dynamics.
He is a member of the RIT Collaborative for Plastics and the Environment, the pELAstic Project, and the Lake Ontario Microplastics Center.
Born and raised in Baltimore, MD, he graduated from Williams College in 2004 with a B.A. in Mathematics and Astrophysics, completing a senior honors thesis in quantum mechanics. He received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2009, focusing on data assimilation and forecasting chaotic dynamical systems, and spent several months working in Brazil at the Center for Weather Forecasts and Climate Research. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University before joining RIT as an Assistant Professor in 2011.
Outside of work he is an avid sports fan — he played baseball in college and remains a devoted Orioles fan — and enjoys reading, photography, crosswords, and baking. He lives in Brighton, NY with his wife, Caitlin.