Henok Tadesse Bireda

Junior Faculty Trainee

Henok Tadesse Bireda is a Researcher and Epidemic Intelligence Officer at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI). His work centers on surveillance, response and outbreak response of vector-borne diseases and NTDs, including malaria, dengue, leishmaniasis, and human African trypanosomiasis. He has led outbreak investigations for these diseases, built the Ethiopian Malaria Surveillance and Forecasting Hub, and contributed to pathogen genomic surveillance design under the EpiGen Ethiopia project. He was a co-investigator on the Glasgow-led rapid response to the re-emergence of sleeping sickness in Ethiopia after more than thirty years without a reported case.

He is also an Instructor and Technician with Applied Epi, delivering live R training to international cohorts of epidemiologists and public health practitioners, covering data cleaning, visualisation, and automated reporting in reproducible workflows. Alongside this, he founded CSID-NET Ethiopia, a Wellcome Trust-funded open-science community of practice bringing together researchers, practitioners, and software developers, and he sits on a PHA4GE technical working group on bioinformatics pipeline and documentation standards. He has been an Africa CDC Bioinformatics Fellow and holds the Roche African Genomics Bursary through MRC/UVRI and LSHTM. He has seven peer-reviewed publications, including co-first authorship of a 2025 PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases paper on a Leishmania tropica outbreak in the Somali Region. He now joins URBAN-VECTOR as a Junior Faculty Fellow.