Rob Zsom has spent much of his life at the UvA. In the 1960s and 1970s, he studied chemistry at the UvA and obtained his PhD with professors Jan Verhoeven and Thymen de Boer. He left for AkzoNobel, where he stayed for over twenty years, developing his qualities as a research leader and manager in general.

In 1999, he returned to his alma mater to become director of the Instituut voor Moleculaire Chemie (IMC). These were turbulent years in the university organisation: in 2002, the at that time Faculty of Chemistry merged into the large Faculty of Science, and the IMC merged with the  Instituut voor Technische Scheikunde to become the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS).

As the very first HIMS director, Rob Zsom managed to bypass all the pitfalls and, despite the initially awkward cooperation, forge a thriving research institute with a strong position in Dutch chemistry research and beyond. The Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences is deeply indebted to Rob Zsom for his leadership from which it still benefits today.