Van der Hoek grew up in the Netherlands and graduated from Erasmus University Rotterdam with BS and MS degrees in Business-Oriented Computer Science in 1994.
[1] He continued his studies as a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder in computer science where he researched mainly technical aspects of configuration management.
[1] His thesis was titled A reusable, distributed repository for configuration management policy programming, and was directed by Alexander L.
[2] In 2000, van der Hoek moved to the University of California, Irvine where his research interest shifted to understanding the role of design in software engineering.
His approach to research is deeply linked to actual tool creation, rather than focusing purely on theoretical perspectives of a matter.