Olaf M.J. van ‘t Erve received his B.S., M.S., and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, in 1995, 1998 and 2002 respectively, from hogeschool Enschede and the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He started his career in spintronic devices with his Ph.D. research that focused on spin-polarized hot-electron transport through metals. Since then he has done his spintronic research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, USA. Here he focuses on spin transport in technologically relevant semiconductors like Silicon. From 2005 to 2007 he worked as a senior scientist at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

He has authored and co-authored 46 scientific papers with over 1000 citations and has an h-factor of 17, he also holds three patents.