Pierre Hohenberg was appointed NYU's Senior Vice Provost for Research in April 2004.

In this post, Hohenberg provides University-wide leadership in advancing research at NYU, coordinates research between various schools of the University, and oversees strategic planning for the University's research enterprise. The University receives some $300 million a year from government, foundation, and private sources to support its research enterprise.

From 1995 to 2003, he served as Yale's Deputy Provost for Science and Technology and was the Eugene Higgins Adjunct Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Yale. Prior to coming to Yale, he had a 30-year association with AT&T Bell Laboratories, one of the world's pre-eminent corporate research institutions; from 1985 to 1989, he was head of the theoretical physics department there. He was also a professor of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich from 1974 to 1977.

Hohenberg's principal areas of scholarship include condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and non-equilibrium phenomena. He is particularly well-known as one of the originators of Density Functional Theory and of the Dynamical Scaling Theory of critical phenomena. He has been the author or co-author of more than 100 publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among which are: member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Physical Society, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of the Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics, the Max Planck Medaille of the German Physical Society, and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. In addition, he has served on numerous advisory committees to universities, federal agencies, and national and international professional organizations.

Hohenberg received his bachelor's (1956), master's (1958), and doctoral (1962) degrees, all in physics, from Harvard University.