Van Wijk received his Master of Surgery from the Delft University of Technology in 1982. His master"s thesis, on simulation of traffic collisions, led him to become interested in computer visualization, and he remained at Delft for his doctoral studies, completing a Doctor of Philosophy in 1986 under the supervision of Dennis J. McConalogue.
He worked at the Energy Centre of the Netherlands from 1988 until 1998, when he joined the Eindhoven faculty. He was promoted to a full professorship in 2001. As well as being a faculty member at Technology Union Eindhoven, van Wijk is the vice president for scientific affairs at MagnaView, a Dutch information visualization company.
In information visualization, Van Wijk is known for his research in texture synthesis, treemaps, and flow visualization.
He has twice been program co-chair for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Visualization, and once for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers InfoVis. In graph drawing, van Wijk has worked on the visualization of small-world networks and on the depiction of abstract trees as biological trees.
He has also conducted user studies that showed that the standard depiction of directed edges in graph drawings using arrowheads is less effective at conveying the directionality of the edges to readers than other conventions such as tapering. He was one of two invited speakers at the 19th International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2011, and the capstone speaker at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VIS 2013.
