Carolin Hoffmann completed her Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences at Maastricht University in 2011, where she developed a strong interest in neurosciences and immunology. She obtained her Master of Medical Sciences from Karolinska Institute in 2013, including an exchange at the National University of Singapore. Motivated by the interplay between the immune system and brain function, she pursued a PhD at Maastricht University investigating autoantibodies in psychotic disorders, supported by two competitive individual fellowships. During her PhD, Carolin established and optimized multiple autoantibody detection methods, enabling the identification of complex neuronal membrane antigens. She screened large schizophrenia and control cohorts, demonstrating that antibodies associated with autoimmune encephalitis are rare in these populations. Her work led to publications in JAMA Psychiatry and other leading journals. She also developed a radioimmunoassay for a7 acetylcholine receptor antibodies and performed patient B-cell immortalization and single-cell cloning during a visiting period at The Scripps Research Institute, introducing this methodology to her home institution. After defending her PhD in 2018, Carolin continued as a postdoctoral researcher contributing to projects on autoantibodies in schizophrenia and depression, and collaborating with neurology clinicians to identify autoimmune cases with novel antigen targets. She also visited Biodonostia (San Sebastián) to investigate mitochondrial and complement-related mechanisms in neurodevelopment. In 2020, Carolin joined the University of Algarve as an individual CEEC fellow to study the role of the complement system in schizophrenia. She performed a meta-analysis of whole-genome methylation data from post-mortem prefrontal cortex and identified differential methylation of complement genes in schizophrenia. She subsequently established iPSC-derived neuronal models to investigate how genetic and environmental factors shape complement-mediated neurodevelopmental processes, securing her first funding as principal investigator. Since July 2025, Carolin has been a tenure researcher in Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of Algarve, where she continues to develop iPSC derived cerebral organoid models linking immune dysregulation, neurodevelopment, and psychiatric disease.