Our team

Birhanu has been keen on facilitating research and academic links between experts and institutes in Germany and Ethiopia, with the goal of setting up innovative platforms where solutions can meet challenges and the ultimate goal of building capacity in Ethiopia. For instance, he was part of a team from Universität Hamburg that coordinated and conducted hands-on laboratory training in molecular and microbial techniques for emerging researchers at the University of Gondar.

Formerly, Birhanu served as a lecturer at the University of Gondar and as adjunct assistant professor at Addis Ababa University, teaching enzyme technology, microbial secondary metabolites and bio-prospecting. He holds a BSc in Applied Microbiology and an MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Gondar and Addis Ababa University respectively. Birhanu has built a rich network within multiple academic, research and health institutions across Ethiopia.

Since 2000, Dr. Aderajew Waka has been a pivotal figure in clinical immunology, autoimmunology and rheumatology at Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the German Rheumatism Research Centre (DRFZ), where he also achieved his doctorate. His research focuses on immunology, autoimmune diseases, rheumatology, infection medicine, tropical medicine, global public health, Global One Health and zoonosis. He is certified for drug safety and monitoring as well as for medical products and devices, and is an honorary lecturer and trainer for pharmacists and pharmaceutical assistants, medical doctors and other health professionals in Germany.

Beyond his clinical and research work, Dr. Waka is committed to the dissemination of knowledge. Since completing his training in Berlin he has been actively involved in facilitating knowledge exchange between Germany and Ethiopia, and in networking universities for bilateral cooperation between the two countries. In Ethiopia he serves as a lecturer, seminar and course leader, and as a capacity building consultant at various universities, working to bridge the gap in medical education, research and practice.

Dr. Waka is an ambassador of Brain City Berlin for Science and Technology and of Tedda Health Science College in Tedda-Gonder, Ethiopia. Since February 2024 he has been an International Diaspora Advisory Board member of MEG at GIZ and BMZ. He is founder and manager of the Kess Waka Meskelo International Medical Center (KWMIMC) in Gonder, a board member and founder of two diaspora organisations in Germany, a technical advisory board member of TOG/VSF (Vétérinaires Sans Frontières) in Germany, and a member of the Global Health Hub Germany, the WHO Hub in Germany and the One Health Platform in Germany.

He earned his bachelor's degree in Economics from Arba Minch University, Ethiopia, graduating with very great distinction, and a diploma in Banking and Finance from Bahir Dar University. He received a DAAD scholarship under the “Public Policy and Good Governance” programme and completed his master's degree in Public Economics, Law and Politics at Leuphana University, Germany.

As a PhD candidate at Kiel University he holds the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) scholarship for his doctoral research, which focuses on political and economic transformation in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to democratic transition and economic development.

Previously he worked with Ethiopia's Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, first as a development planning and research assistant and then as an economist. Before joining the ministry he served as HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Coordinator at the Woreda Health Office in the South West Region of Ethiopia.

Yohannis began his academic journey at Arba Minch University in Ethiopia, where he graduated with a BSc in Hydraulic Engineering in 2006. After graduation he joined Arba Minch University as an assistant lecturer, contributing to teaching and research from 2006 to 2008.

In pursuit of advanced knowledge he moved to Europe to attend the Joint European Master in Environmental Studies at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and Aalborg University with an Erasmus Mundus scholarship, graduating in 2010. From 2011 to 2014 he worked on his PhD at TUHH, supported by the IPSWaT scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Since 2014 Yohannis has worked as a research assistant at the Institute of River and Coastal Engineering at TUHH, involved in various projects specialising in hydrodynamic numerical modelling, hydrology and GIS for environmental applications.

At HCDS he leads and consults on research projects focused on digital humanities, primarily involving big data processing of textual content. His activities include computing and data science research, industry collaboration, technical consultation, and the advancement of digitalisation and data science for developing and emerging nations. He also trains and teaches in areas related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and data science.

He is involved in a research data and knowledge management project, an intersectional initiative combining knowledge management, AI and library science, which aims to automatically ingest metadata from diverse research reports and projects and present the outcomes with appealing visualisations.

He earned his PhD from Universität Hamburg, specialising in integrating adaptive machine learning models into annotation tools and NLP applications. Since January 2020 he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Language Technology Group, working on social media NLP — hate speech detection, fake news identification and sentiment analysis — and on low-resource language NLP, particularly for Amharic. He also teaches NLP courses and supervises master's projects and theses within the group.

Biruhalem earned his PhD from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, funded by the SINGA scholarship at the Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR. He later completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Hamburg, Germany, specialising in computational pathway modelling and antiviral discovery. Previously he served as an assistant professor and lecturer at the Aklilu Lemma Institute of Pathobiology, Addis Ababa University, and as a clinical laboratory professional at ALERT Hospital in Ethiopia.