Born in
Bennekom, Bodlaender was educated at Utrecht University, earning a doctorate in 1986 under the supervision of
Jan van Leeuwen with the thesis
Distributed Computing – Structure and Complexity. After
postdoctoral research at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, he returned to Utrecht as a faculty member. In 1987 he was appointed Assistant Professor and in 2003 Associate Professor. In 2014 he became full professor of algorithms and complexity at Utrecht, and at the same time added a part-time professorship in network algorithms at
Eindhoven University of Technology. ==Recognition==