Born in Bennekom, Bodlaender was educated at Utrecht University, earning a doctorate in 1986 under the supervision of Jan van Leeuwen with the thesis Distributed Computing – Structure and Complexity.
[1][2] After postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, he returned to Utrecht as a faculty member.
In 2014 he became full professor of algorithms and complexity at Utrecht, and at the same time added a part-time professorship in network algorithms at Eindhoven University of Technology.
[3] In 2014 he was awarded the Nerode Prize for an outstanding paper in the area of multivariate algorithmics, for his work with Rod Downey, Michael Fellows, and Danny Hermelin on kernelization.
[4] A festschrift, Treewidth, Kernels, and Algorithms: Essays Dedicated to Hans L. Bodlaender on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, was published in 2020.