Paul Van den Hof was born in 1957 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees both from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands in 1982 and 1989, respectively. From 1986 to 1999 he was an assistant and associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Systems and Control Group of Delft University of Technology (TUD), The Netherlands. From 1999 to 2003 he was a full professor in the Signals, Systems and Control Group of the Department of Applied Physics at Delft University of Technology.  Since 2003 he has been full professor and founding co-director (together with M. Verhaegen) of the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), with appointments at the Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE),  and the Faculty of Applied Sciences. From 2004 to 2009 he has been Department Head and Director of DCSC, and member of the management team of the Faculty 3mE of TUD. This role included the initiative for setting up an international MSc Programme Systems and Control.

Since 2012 he is full professor and chair of the Control Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, while part-time employed (1 day/week) at Delft University of Technology. 

Since 2005 he is also Scientific Director of the national research and graduate school "Dutch Institute of Systems and Control" (DISC), that is accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and that has obtained recognition and funding as a national Graduate Programme by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2010.    

He was General Chair of the 13th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 2003, Editor of the Symposium Proceedings, and Guest-Editor of the Automatica Special Issue "Data-Based Modelling and System Identification", March 2005. 

Paul Van den Hof's research interests are in issues of system identification, parametrization, signal processing and model-based control design, with applications in industrial process control systems, including petroleum reservoir engineering systems, mechanical servo systems and physical measurement systems. He is project coordinator of the EU funded project Autoprofit (Advanced Autonomous Model-Based Operation of Industrial Process Systems), 2010-2012.

He teaches in the graduate program of the research school DISC, and has been a guest lecturer in the Belgian graduate school on Systems and Control (1997, 2003, 2011) and in the University of Campina Grande, Brasil (2004), and he has been guest researcher at The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia (1992, 2007), and the University of California at San Diego (2011).   

He has been a member of the IFAC Council (1999-2005), Associate Editor of Automatica (1992-1999), Automatica Editor for Technical Communiques and Rapid Publications (1999-2005), elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society (2003-2005), and member of the Administrative Council of the European Union Control Association (EUCA). In 2007 he was elected as IFAC Fellow and as Fellow of IEEE.