[2] Among his doctoral students are algorithms researcher and Utrecht faculty member Hans Bodlaender and notable game software developer and former fellow Utrecht faculty member, Mark Overmars.
[2] Van Leeuwen is a member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities since 1992, and in 2006 he was elected to the Academia Europaea.
In 2013 he received the ACM Distinguished Service Award, together with Gerhard Goos and Juris Hartmanis.
Jan van Leeuwen was the editor of the two-volume Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science.
His son, Erik Jan van Leeuwen, is also an academic computer scientist.