Dr. Dawit Wolday
Associate Professor, McMaster University.
Senior Research Scientist, EPHI.
Dr. Dawit Wolday is trained as a Medical Doctor at Gondar College of Medical Sciences (1987), obtained his MSc in Medical Microbiology from Addis Ababa University (1993), both in Ethiopia, and obtained his PhD in Immunology from Karolinska Institutet (2000), Stockholm, Sweden. He has three decades of research experience in infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, sexually transmitted infections and neglected infectious diseases. His experience covers pathogenesis, genomic epidemiology, clinical studies, drug resistance and diagnostics. He teaches different courses and has ample experience in mentoring MSc and PhD postgraduate students. He is currently a promoter of 3 Ph.D. programs.
Dr. Wolday served as the Laboratory Director and Program Manager of the Ethio-Netherlands AIDS Research Program (ENARP) based at the former Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute (EHNRI), currently named the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI). At ENARP/EHNRI, Dr. Dawit led several state-of-the-art research related to molecular epidemiology, immunological aspects, and clinical studies of HIV/AIDS in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. He trained several Ph.D. and MSc students and was also instrumental in the establishment of the National Laboratory Systems of Ethiopia as well as several African countries. He is currently Associate Professor, at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, and a Senior Research Scientist at EPHI.
He serves as an editorial board and reviewer of several scientific journals, including Lancet Global Health, AIDS, AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, Journal of Infectious Diseases, PLoS NTDs, PLos One and Parasite Immunology, to mention a few. He also serves as an external reviewer of several research funding agencies, including the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), The Hague, The Netherlands. Dr. Wolday served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of WHO and WHO-AFRO, IAEA, and Ministry of Health Ethiopia in laboratory capacity development as well as EDCTP, and he is currently a member of the Scientific and Strategic Advisory Board of the “Research Networks for Health Innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Dr. Wolday has received several research grant awards and has published 115 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals, 2 book sections and several manuals. He is currently a Senior EDCTP Research Fellow, and the Principal Investigator (PI) of two EDCTP-funded projects: EvaLAMP and Profile-CoV, working on point-of-care diagnostics on leishmaniasis and COVID-19, respectively. Dr. Dawit is a co-investigator of the EDCTP-funded SteRN ethics-capacity development project, and Co-investigator of the National Institute for Health Research (UK)–funded DESTINE project working on Developing Diagnostic and Treatment Strategies for Hepatitis C in Ethiopia.