Stefan G. Hofmann is an international expert on psychotherapy for emotional disorders. He is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Translational Clinical Psychology at the Philipps University Marburg in Germany. He was born in a little town near Stuttgart in Germany, which may explain his thick German accent. He studied psychology at the Philipps University Marburg, Germany, where he received his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. A brief dissertation fellowship to spend some time at Stanford University turned into a longer research career in the United States. He eventually moved to the United States in 1994. He has been professor at Boston University since 1996 and received an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for the Philipps University Marburg, Germany, in 2021. He now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, Boston, and Cape Cod. Dr. Hofmann has an actively funded research program studying various aspects of emotional disorders with a particular emphasis on anxiety disorders, cognitive behavioral therapy, and neuroscience. More recently, he has been interested in mindfulness approaches, such as yoga and meditation practices, as treatment strategies of emotional disorders. Furthermore, he has been one of the leaders in translational research methods to enhance the efficacy of psychotherapy and to predict treatment outcome using neuroscience methods. He is co-developer) of Process-based Therapy.

He has won many prestigious professional awards, including the Aaron T. Beck Award for Significant and Enduring Contributions to the Field of Cognitive Therapy by the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and was president of various national and international professional societies, including the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy. He was an advisor to the DSM-5 Development Process and a member of the DSM-5 Anxiety Disorder Sub-Work Group. As part of this, he participated in the discussions about the revisions of the DSM-5 criteria for various anxiety disorders, especially social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and agoraphobia. Dr. Hofmann is a Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researcher. Dr. Hofmann has been the editor in chief of Cognitive Therapy and Research and he has published more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 books, including An Introduction of Modern CBT (Wiley-Blackwell) and Emotion in Therapy (Guilford Press). At leisure, he enjoys playing with his sons. He likes traveling to immerse himself into new cultures, make new friends, and reconnect with old ones. When time permits, he occasionally gets out his flute.