Robert E. Maleczka, Jr. was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. In 1984 he earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Illinois. Upon graduation, he accepted a position with the discovery group at Abbott Labs, working on the development of novel arylfluoroquinolone antibacterial agents. In 1987, he left Abbott and enrolled in graduate school at Ohio State University. In late 1992, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow. In the fall of 1995, he began his career at Michigan State University.

Among his service and outreach activities, Maleczka has served as a Diversity Scholar at the Center for the Integration of Teaching and Learning (Madison, Wisconsin) and has been an advisory board member for the MSU Chapter of NOBCChE. He served as the treasurer of the MSU local section of the American Chemical Society from 1996 to 2011 and is currently an elected Member-at-Large of the Executive Committee of the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry. In 2006, Maleczka co-founded BoroPharm, Inc., a company dedicated to the preparation and commercialization of novel aryl and heteroaryl building blocks for organic/pharmaceutical synthesis. In late 2010, Maleczka became the Chair of the Department of Chemistry.

[Adapted from http://www2.chemistry.msu.edu/faculty/maleczka/bio.html]