Malcolm joined Meridian International Center as a program officer in 1984. He became senior program officer in 2000, retired in January 2004, and returned in March 2005 as a seasonal program officer. He taught at the University of Chattanooga (now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga); was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies; and, from 1970 to 1981, was assistant to the president and director of programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He served as the Arabian Peninsula affairs analyst at the U.S. Department of State from 1981 to 1983. Malcolm has written on Persian/Arabian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula issues in chapters contributed to nine books and in a number of articles. He is the author of The United Arab Emirates: A Venture in Unity (1986) as well as the Historical Dictionary of the Gulf Arab States (1997), which was updated and expanded in a second edition published in 2007. He has been a contributor to Arabies Trends, the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, Microsoft Encarta, and the World Book. In 2011, he contributed the chapter on the United Arab Emirates to the World Almanac of Islamism. Malcolm has a AB and AM from Harvard University and an MA, MA in Law and Diplomacy and a Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He speaks some French and Arabic and has a smattering of German, Spanish, and Tagalog.