Jan van den Berg studied mathematics and physics at the TUDelft while being active in the national student movement. He lectured courses in mathematics, physics and computer science on institutes of higher education in Breda and Eindhoven, and mathematics and physics at the secondary school of Nampula, Mozambique.

Jan worked at the Econometric Institute of Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he lectured courses in computer science and economics. Jan did research in many fields, especially in computational intelligence, with applications in combinatorial optimization, finance, agriculture, philosophy, bibliometrics, among others. From 2006 up till now, Jan worked on topics related to (Big) Data Analytics and/or Cyber Security.