He graduated in 1998 with an M.Sc. degree in both "Mathematics" and "Business Mathematics and Informatics" at VU University Amsterdam. He carried out his Ph.D. research on "Markov decision processes: the control of high-dimensional systems" at the same university. In the academic year 2002-2003, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories (USA) as NWO Talent Stipend fellow.