Over his 25-year career at Bryn Mawr College, organic chemistry professor Bill Malachowski has watched with satisfaction as student researchers he has mentored go on to graduate school and impressive careers in academia and industry.
“It’s kind of like your academic children,” says the 60-year-old father of three known as “Dr. Mal” to his students. “It makes me most proud of what I do here. I’m not going to invent a drug. I’m not going to win a Nobel Prize. But I can invest time in these students and see them do amazing things.”
One undergrad was involved with Pfizer’s warp-speed development of the COVID treatment Paxlovid. Another was awarded a Fulbright. His students have also pursued M.D. and Ph.D. programs and landed at well-regarded universities and pharma companies.
Malachowski, who keeps a list, has worked with close to 100 research students, including 90 undergraduates — an enviable record. Students trained in his 10-bench organic synthesis lab have gone on to doctorates at one of the highest rates in the nation, 22 percent, he says. Malachowski points out that if he were a higher-ed institution, his yield would only trail the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, based on a 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) brief on where science and engineering doctoral recipients earned their baccalaureates.
“It’s not me,” he says of his students’ successes. “It’s them. They are very motivated and so bright.”
In August, Malachowski won a $549,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop more efficient, state-of-the-art methods to construct complex molecules popular in drug therapies. The three-year award will support even more undergraduate researchers. Malachowski is the principal investigator on the grant; co-investigator Paul Rablen is a professor of chemistry at Swarthmore College.
In his time at Bryn Mawr, Malachowski has brought in nearly $2.1 million in extramural funding from the NIH, NSF, and American Chemical Society.
His students give the easy-to-talk-with professor known for his dad jokes and pop culture references plenty of credit for his teaching and mentoring skills.
Senior Kyra Kuelgen, who is doing her senior thesis with Malachowski, recalls that when the Barbie movie came out, “he had an organic chemistry problem about Barbie. He makes it really fun. I decided after his class to be a chemistry major.”
Jonas Goldsmith, an associate professor and chair of chemistry, has known Malachowski for two decades. “What we aspire to at Bryn Mawr as faculty is to be teacher-scholars,” Goldsmith says. “That’s really hard to do — to be good at two separate things. Bill is a good example of someone who is that.”
On any given day, Goldsmith says, Malachowski might have a bunch of students from class gathered around the large conference table in his office — the one with the Justin Bieber poster on the door — “talking organic chemistry for hours and hours. The amount of care he has for his students is amazing.”
Jisun Lee ’06 remembers how Malachowski always balanced guiding her and giving her room to grow. One summer, she spent 40-plus-hour weeks, as Malachowski expected from summer researchers, synthesizing compounds with the potential for biological activity. But Lee, who was published twice as an undergrad, has no complaints. “The level and quality of research I was exposed to was like a big university,” she says.
Lee got her doctorate and did her post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania, impressing her adviser with her note keeping on experiments, something Malachowski had emphasized. In 2019, she joined Pfizer as part of a small drug discovery group. When COVID hit, she was one of six working on a treatment. Four months later, the team had its first lead compound. In less than a year, Paxlovid came to market — an unheard-of timeline.
“It was a crazy time,” says Lee, senior principal scientist in medicinal chemistry at Pfizer. “Having that good work ethic and mindset from my undergraduate years have carried me through the rigors of graduate school and now industry.”
Yuan Qiao ’10 remembers Malachowski drawing chemical structures and reactions on the blackboard in his organic chemistry class. She and the other students copied them down. Now, as an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Qiao does the same — albeit on a tablet, not a blackboard. “I think it’s very good practice because students learn by writing,” she says. “Though I admit, my handwriting is certainly not as neat as Dr. Mal’s.”
