Eulogy for Miguel Malek Maalouf

We will remember Malek as a committed researcher and lecturer in the Global Sustainable Production section (GSP) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), in Odense.

’I had to help Malek go to the train, carry his backpack and help him onto the train. He was unable to do it himself.
But he insisted on going to SDU to help his students’

- those were more or less the words spoken by Malek’s wife, Rania, when Head of Section, Professor Jan Vang visited Malek in the hospital the day before he passed away.

Malek was born and grew up in Lebanon, and later he moved to Brazil, and then to Denmark. He received his PhD from CBS in 2013 and continued to work in the field of Operations Management until in 2015, when he was employed at Aalborg University, Copenhagen. In February 2020, Malek started at SDU as Associate Professor in the GSP section, where he resumed his long-standing research collaboration with Peter Hasle and Jan Vang, while also teaching Supply Chain in many guises in the GMM programme.

Malek contributed to research in the field of Sustainability, working to improve working and health conditions for workers in the garment and leather industries in Bangladesh. He was very committed to getting out into the factories and ensuring that the research was not kept within the walls of the university. At the same time, he wished that the research should contribute to theory development. In Supply Chain Management, Malek was one of the first to publish on Paradox Theory. A theory he also used in his studies in Bangladesh.

Malek was a highly valued colleague which can be seen from the many e-mails that both Rania and SDU have received from colleagues in Denmark and Bangladesh, in which they express their support.

Malek took great pride in his work, and he kept his focus on the work that lay ahead. He was dedicated to the extent that he held an exam online shortly before his death. He was very private about the course of his illness, and he never lost faith as he planned to return to his work when the treatment had taken effect. Sadly, it did not go as he hoped, and on Sunday 2 June he passed away, surrounded by his family, at the age of 60.

Let us honor the memory of Miguel Malek Maalouf.

Our thoughts are with Malek's wife and son, and his close family.

On behalf of Department of Technology and Innovation,
Jeroen Bergmann, Head of Department,
Jan Vang, Head of Section GSP