After obtaining his Master’s degree in biomedical sciences, with a major in epidemiology, from the Radboud University in 2008, Rob started working as a junior researcher on a PhD project regarding the epidemiology of uncommon male genital cancers at the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (IKNL) and successfully defended his PhD thesis at the Erasmus University in February 2012.

Since then Rob has been employed as senior researcher at IKNL. As of September 2020, he is also part-time employed as a senior researcher at the department of Medical Oncology of the Amsterdam UMC, while remaining part-time employed at IKNL.

His research focusses on analysing the real-world treatment and outcome of patients with oesophageal or gastric cancer. By using innovative methodologies to analyse real-world data Rob intends to contribute to the academic knowledge of these methodologies. But at the same time, trying to create potential societal impact by presenting the output in such way that it can be used by physicians and patients to improve decision making and outcome in the daily clinical oncology practice. Next to studies on Upper-GI cancers, Rob has a special interest in gender differences in incidence, tumour characteristics, treatment allocation and outcome in oncology.

Rob is member of the board of the Dutch Upper-GI Cancer Group (DUCG), treasurer and member of the executive board of the International Association of Cancer Registries (IACR) and member of the ESMO Gender Medicine Task Force.