Born in
Venlo, Van Nunen studied
Applied Mathematics at the
Eindhoven University of Technology, where he received his MA in 1971. There in 1976 he also received his PhD under supervision of
Jaap Wessels with a thesis entitled "Contracting Markov decision processes". After graduating in 1976, Van Nunen started his academic career in Eindhoven as associate professor. In 1978 he was visiting professor at
North Carolina State University in the US for one year. In 1984 he was appointed professor at the Interuniversity Institute of Business Administration in Delft. In the late 1980s this institute was merged into the
Erasmus University Rotterdam, and is now
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Among his PhD students was Walther Ploos van Amstel. Van Nunen had been part-time management consultant at
Deloitte from 1989 to 2006, and had founded his own consultancy firm in 2006. He was board member of the Vereniging Logistiek Management for many year, and was just elected president in 2009. He participated in the EICB (Expertise- en InnovatieCentrum Binnenvaart), and he was one of the founders of the Dinalog (Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics) research institute in
Breda. In 2007 he was awarded the IBM Faculty Award for all his scientific work. Jo van Nunen died from cardiac arrest 12 May 2010 in Vancouver, Canada, where he had been attending a scientific congress. == Publications ==