Malle received his doctorate in 1986 from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology under the supervision of Heinrich Matzat with the thesis Exceptional groups of Lie type as Galois groups.
[5] Malle's research also deals with the Cohen-Lenstra heuristic of the structure of class groups of quadratic number fields in algebraic number theory, the asymptotic distribution of Galois groups of number fields, and with the inverse problem of Galois theory.
In 1993 he began a collaboration with Michel Broué and Jean Michel concerning Spetses (named after the Greek island Σπέτσες where the program was initiated).
In 1998, he was an Invited Speaker with talk Spetses at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.
[6] In 1994 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Franco-German scientific cooperation.