Oliver Zerbe was born in 1963 and studied chemistry at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and in Southampton, UK. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 in organic chemistry from the University in Zurich under the supervision of Wolfgang von Philips born in the field of NMR methodology as applied to peptides.

From 1994 to 1995 he we was a postdoc with Kurt Wüthrich at the Federal Technical University of Switzerland (ETH) working on the design of pulse sequences for isotopic ally labeled proteins. He received his habilitation in medicinal chemistry from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, ETH Zurich, in 2004 under the guidance of Gerd Folkers. Oliver Zerbe is presently head of the NMR facilities and lecturer of the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the University of Zurich where he became a Privatdozent in 2005 and Titular professor in 2008.