IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 49

robert malkin
ieee senior member

52
aGe

Biomedical engineer,
Duke University
occupation

In one village his team visited, the
local product was blue Mao shirts. The
dye process required soaking the shirts
for four or five days. Another volunteer
showed them that by regulating the temperature, they could shorten the dyeing
to just 45 minutes, recalls Malkin.
"That guy knew a really small tidbit of
information," he says, yet it was enough
to change the economic calculus. "Overnight that village stopped selling their
girls into prostitution." The episode
taught him that a tad of clever engineering can sometimes make an enormous
difference in people's lives.
Malkin then got a good offer to return
to the United States and enroll in graduate school at Duke University, in Durham,
photoGraph by

D.L. Anderson

Durham,
N.C.
location

He left a tenured professorship to work on
health-care challenges in the developing world.
hero moment

N.C. His plan was to get a Ph.D. and
return to the mountains of Thailand.
He soon earned master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering,
specializing in a biomedical application aligned with his earlier work in
Switzerland: cardiac electrophysiology. But he didn't go back to Thailand.
Instead, he got married, started a family, and took up faculty appointments,
eventually landing at the University of
Memphis and the University of Tennessee. He was granted tenure and later
became a full professor.
Ma l k i n k new t hat h is ac adem ic
research might improve some people's
lives, but not in the direct way he had witnessed in Thailand. He and a like-minded

engineering colleague, Mohammad
Kiani, often discussed their frustration.
"We had both spent time in the developing world and realized that engineers
had a unique opportunity to make a difference," says Malkin. But how exactly?
They approached William Novick, a
surgeon with the Memphis-based International Children's Heart Foundation,
and asked his advice. He suggested they
join one of the teams of cardiac surgeons
that the foundation sent to developingworld hospitals. The engineers could
presumably help out if a piece of equipment malfunctioned.
"The very first day of the very first trip,
the heart-lung machine broke," recalls
Malkin. "The surge protector had blown
out-it was a 5-minute fix." For an electrical engineer, that is. Most surgeons and
nurses wouldn't know how.
In his free hours Malkin discovered a
lot of defunct equipment. Kiani found
the same to be true in the hospitals he
visited. So they hatched a plan to provide such hospitals with surplus gear
from Tennessee. "We collected university equipment and formed a club to fix it
and prepare it for shipping," says Malkin.
"Very soon we started getting calls from
hospitals throughout the developing
world." So they began sending these
facilities both equipment and engineering students to help keep things working.
His university grew uneasy with the
legal liabilities this activity created,
though. So Malkin, Kiani, and a business partner set up a not-for-profit company called Engineering World Health.
Even then, Malkin's department chairman wasn't pleased. He wanted to see
Malkin remain focused on academic
research and grant seeking.
"It created a huge tension," says Malkin.
"So I left."
In 2004, he walked away from an
endowed full professorship to take up
a non-tenure-track faculty position in
biomedical engineering at Duke, where
Malkin is a lot happier. There, he's been
able to get his | co nti n u e d o n pag e 57

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