[3] His PhD dissertation was entitled "Generalized Singular Values with Algorithms and Applications" and his thesis adviser was Cleve Moler.
Van Loan ran the Computer Science Graduate Program from 1982 to 1987 at Cornell and was the Director of the Undergraduate Studies from 1994 to 1998 and 1999–2003.
In the spring of 2016, Van Loan retired from the Computer Science Department and was promoted to Dean of Faculty, replacing Joseph Burns.
[9] In 2018, he was awarded the John von Neumann Lecture prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
[10] Van Loan's best-known book is Matrix Computations, 3/e (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-8018-5414-9), written with Gene H. Golub.