After receiving his PhD from the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1997, Jan De Houwer was a Lecturer at the University of Southampton (UK) from 1998 to 2001. Since 2001, he is works at Ghent University (Belgium) where he heads the Learning and Implicit Processes Laboratory.

His research is related to the manner in which spontaneous (automatic) preferences are learned and can be measured. Regarding the learning of preferences, he focuses on the role of stimulus pairings (associative learning). With regard to the measurement of preferences, he developed new reaction time measures and examined the processes underlying various measures. Jan De Houwer (co-)authored more than 300 publications in international journals including “Psychological Bulletin” and “Behavioral and Brain Sciences”. He was co-editor of the journal “Cognition and Emotion” and is a member of the editorial board of several journals including “Journal of Experimental Psychology: General”, “Psychological Bulletin”, and “Personality and Social Psychology Review”.