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The Heart of the Story

Linda Malkas, Ph.D. tells the story about how she met her husband, Robert Hickey, Ph.M., Ph.D.

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Bloomington, Indiana (May 30, 2007) —

“I was the first person in my family to go to college, let alone get a Ph.D.,” says Dr. Linda Malkas, Vera Bradley Chair in Oncology. Dr. Malkas earned an A.S. degree in Engineering and a B.S. in Chemistry. While working on her degree in chemistry, she became frustrated about the research in the lab. On top of that, Linda didn’t click with the senior grad student she was assigned to work with. “He did nothing but yell at me,” says Malkas. That senior grad student soon learned that Linda was the brightest undergraduate student in the lab, and that by working with her, his projects moved along much more quickly.

She remembers, “One day he said, ‘You know Linda, you are pretty smart. You should get a Ph.D.’ I was too embarrassed to tell him that I didn’t know what a Ph.D. was!”

As the semester ended, Robert Hickey, the graduate student, invited her to dinner. They soon found that they had much in common, including matching cars. They had visited many of the same restaurants, liked the same kind of music and both found trips to the planetarium exhilarating.

And, as the saying goes, the rest is history…. Dr. Linda Malkas and Dr. Robert Hickey married and have been working together daily ever since, searching for an early detection for breast cancer. They were a team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine for more than 10 years and then made the move (with many members of their research team) to the Indiana University Cancer Center to advance their findings. Although they no longer drive matching cars, they still share a burning desire to find a cure for breast cancer, and a penchant for scientific “lab humor.”

With a smile that fills the room, Dr. Malkas jokes, “He married me because he could get reproducible results!”

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