Malek studied at Algiers Omar Racim High School and graduated in physics at the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene.

[3] Malek earned a PhD in nuclear and particle physics at Université Grenoble-Alpes (former Joseph Fourier University), where she worked on the fission of hypernuclei.

She was leading the Grenoble group who were responsible for the design and prototyping of the Liquid Argon (LAr) Calorimeter and was the scientific leader of the French WLCG grid-computing infrastructure.

[8] Malek was President of the Alps branch of the French Physics Society, Société Française de Physique[9][10] (SFP) from 2000 to 2002.

[11] In 2019, Malek and Kétevi Assamagan, published an opinion letter to address the issue of the absence of the African continent in worldwide science and technology prospects, particularly in fondamental physics.