Reinout Meijboom was born and raised in the Netherlands. He studied chemistry at the University of Groningen where he completed his MSc research under Prof Jan Teuben. Subsequently, he moved to Cape Town to pursue his PhD in organometallic chemistry under the supervision of Prof John R. Moss. Following his PhD, he pursued a post-doctoral fellowship with Prof Andre Roodt at the then Rand Afrikaans University (currently University of Johannesburg) and the University of the Free State.
Reinout took up the position of Senior Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in 2008. There he changed his research direction towards heterogeneous catalysis, while continuing to pursue the crystallography of silver coordination compounds. These compounds were found to shoe apoptotic behavior in cancer cells, and this project is ongoing. He raised through the ranks at UJ to full professor and is the current head of department. Reinout has published over 150 research papers.