[2] Hoodbhoy is known for his opposition to nuclear weapons and vocal defence of secularism, freedom of speech, scientific temper and education in Pakistan.
[14] In 2021 he took the lead role in establishing The Black Hole, a community space in Islamabad for nurturing science, art, and culture.
Hoodbhoy has written for Project Syndicate,[15] DAWN,[16] The New York Times,[17] Washington Post,[18] Prospect magazine,[19] and The Express Tribune.
[27] On 14 April 2001, the Pakistan government announced that Hoodbhoy had been selected for receiving the Sitara-i-Imtiaz from then-president, General Pervez Musharraf.
[28] Hoodbhoy was born and raised in Karachi, Sindh, in a family belonging to the Gujarati Khoja Ismaili Shia community.
[30] He has one elder brother, and three sisters including infectious diseases specialist Dr. Naseem Salahuddin and reporter Nafisa Hoodbhoy.
After two years of teaching and activism he returned to MIT to work on various problems of nuclear structure theory under the supervision of Prof. John W. Negele.
[33] Hoodbhoy's PhD research was in nuclear physics but much of his later work focused on the quark-gluon structure of nuclei, quantum chromodynamics, and particle phenomenology.
[35][36] Hoodbhoy points to Noam Chomsky, whose courses and lectures he had attended as an undergraduate at MIT, as a major influence upon his political philosophy.
[37] In the early 1970s Hoodbhoy worked actively with People's Labour Federation, a progressive trade union in Rawalpindi and was part of an independent Marxist group at Islamabad University headed by Professor Faheem Husain.
[40] He has sharply criticized efforts to merge religion with science; the politicization of Islam and growth of religious extremism; Pakistan's blasphemy law; military dictators and their surrogates in Pakistan; the subjugation of Pakistani women; the takeover of the educational process by religious forces; and opposed jihad for liberating Kashmir and fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
In 1996 Hoodbhoy, together with his colleague A.H Nayyar, successfully stopped the sale of Quaid-e-Azam University's land to politicians and professors, invoking a strong counter-reaction.
[49] He has been the leading critic of Pakistan's Higher Education Commission whose policies, he contends, have incentivized academic corruption[50] and created a professor mafia.
While at MIT Hoodbhoy studied under physicists such as Victor Weisskopf, Philip Morrison, and Bernard Feld from the 1940s Manhattan Project.
From 1991 to 2004 Hoodbhoy hosted and authored three major 13-part documentary series in Urdu on Pakistan Television on popular science and education.