He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam and CWI (2005), and was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University (2005–2007). His main research area is discrete optimization, with a specific focus on constraint programming. Van Hoeve is editor of Constraints and Constraint Programming Letters, and an associate editor of Decision Analytics. Van Hoeve's research on decision diagrams for discrete optimization has been supported by NSF and Google.