Born in 1965[1] in Veenendaal, the Netherlands, Steven J. van Enk lived in Holland until 1993.
[3] Van Enk is a national FIDE Master chess player.
[1][4] Van Enk held postdoc positions at the MaxPlanck Institute of Quantum Optics, at the University of Innsbruck, and at Cal Tech, where he worked with H. Jeff Kimble, a leading theorist in quantum information.
Van Enk was then a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs for six years.
In 2006 van Enk joined the University of Oregon Physics Department,[5] where he became a full professor in 2009.