Robert Malkin

Robert A. Malkin is an engineer and academic whose work focuses on medical instrumentation for low- and middle-income countries. He is a professor of the practice emeritus of biomedical engineering and professor of the practice of global health at Duke University, and an affiliate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. In 2015, IEEE Spectrum named him among its Today's Engineering Heroes.

Career

Before graduate school, Malkin worked in industry across several countries. He designed integrated circuits at EM Microelectronics in Switzerland, designed pacemakers at Cordis Corporation, and worked on heart-lung machines at Sarns Incorporated. He also spent time teaching English in Thailand.

After completing his doctorate, Malkin joined the faculty at City College of New York as a professor of electrical engineering and a member of the graduate faculty of the City University of New York, with a research affiliation at Columbia University. He later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he held the Herbert Herff Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at the joint biomedical engineering program of the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee.

In 2004, Malkin left the endowed chair to take a non-tenure-track position at his doctoral alma mater, Duke University, where he has remained since. He has held a joint appointment at the Duke Global Health Institute since 2011 and became a professor of the practice emeritus in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering in 2021.