Van attended Harvard College with concentration in mathematics, studying geometry and topology, earned an MD at Albert Einstein in NYC, and licensed to practice internal medicine, and nuclear medicine. He came to Harvard MGH as a fellow in imaging and MRI in 1983, and has since worked on a series of problems that pair novel imaging physics and engineering with novel biological and biomedical questions. During the 1980s he developed flow imaging with MRI, including MR angiography in 1985 and later diffusion MRI, including tractography in 1995 and high angular resolution diffusion in 1999, proposing the human connectome scanner in 2005. His recent work focuses on the architecture of brain connectivity, and recently proposing that brain pathways follow a simple geometric organization resembling a coordinate grid.