Before teaching at Berkeley, he held an appointment as a Senior Lecturer in Chichewa and Linguistics at the University of Malawi, where he pioneered the Department of African Languages and Linguistics. In 1984 he first traveled to the United States with the sponsorship of the Fulbright Foundations as a Visiting Scholar at MIT and Stanford. Mr. Mchombo has written numerous articles in journals such as Linguistic Analysis, Natural Language Theory and also contributed a chapter, entitled "The Democratic Transition in Malawi: Its roots and prospects," in Coping with Ambiguity: Political Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Late 20th Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. 1998.). His research interests lie in syntax, African linguistic structures and Swahili.