Mirjam Snellen was born in The Netherlands in 1971. She received the degree of aeronautical engineer from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 1995.
Since 1996, she has been working in the Underwater Acoustics group of the Physics and Electronics Laboratory of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). Her research mainly concerns the field of matched field processing, which is the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation.