He graduated in August 1993 in operations research from the Department of Econometrics at the University of Groningen, where he had also been a teaching assistant in statistics and a research assistant in econometrics. From Sept 1993 to Sept 1997, he was a PhD student at the Econometric Institute and the Tinbergen Institute of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, under supervision of Shuzhong Zhang.
Jos spent the academic year 1997/1998 as a post-doctoral fellow at the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) of McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, as a TALENT stipend of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). At McMaster University, he was a member of the ASPC group of Zhi-Quan (Tom) Luo.
After his post-doctoral fellowship at McMaster, he returned to the Netherlands, and from October 1998 to January 2001, he was a lecturer at Maastricht University, at the Department of Quantitative Economics, in the group of Antoon Kolen.
In January 2000, his PhD thesis was awarded the Gijs de Leve prize for the best thesis in operations research in the years 1997-1999 in The Netherlands.
In February 2001, Jos was appointed as an Associate Professor at Tilburg University, and a fellow of CentER (Center for economic research). In July 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Vernieuwingsimpuls (Innovation) grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Jos was the editor of the newsletter SIAG/Optimization Views-and-News of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization (SIAG/OPT), and a council member-at-large of the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS).
His scholarly works include more than 30 papers, and his PhD thesis was published in edited form in the volume `High performance optimization', Frenk et al. eds., Kluwer Academic Press, 2000. He was also the author of a widely used optimization software package called SeDuMi.
He is survived by his wife Changqing and daughter Stefanie, and his brother Pim and parents Frans and Els.