Molalegne Bitew obtained Ph.D. in 2014 on Major Molecular Virology and Minor Immunology and Biotechnology from the prestigious institute (IVRI). He has been teaching courses for graduate students (M.Sc., and Ph.D.) as an associate professor at different universities in Ethiopia and abroad. Since March 2017, he has been working at Bio and Emerging Technology Institute (BETin) of Ethiopia as Principal (lead) scientist and Director of the Health Biotechnology Directorate under the Ministry of Innovation and Technology (MiNT). In the meantime, He was also a visiting scientist fellow (Postdoctoral) at IVRI under CV Raman fellowship. He participated different short term trainings in many different countries on Virology (India, Italy, and Germany), Vaccine development and efficacy testing (South Africa, Ghana, Austria, and China), Bioinformatics and genomics (India, South Africa) and Diagnostics including sequencing (Italy, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda). He won different grants from national (from BETin and MiNT annual competitive research grants) and international research grants from (IAEA, Bio-innovate Africa/ICIPE, ICGEB, BMGF, EDCTP-3, Global Fund, and ACTS). He supervised a lot of MSc and PhD students of Ethiopian and other African country origin. He has published manuscripts extensively at different reputed international journals. March 2020, He established and headed the COVID-19 testing and research lab and his lab was testing 400 samples per day. The lab totally tested 77,000 people. Currently, He is coordinating the National Virus Research Center (NVRC). He has Illumina and ONT sequencing platforms in his lab. He is highly interested on impactful research and development works on vaccine, diagnostic and therapeutic development research in one health approach as these are given mandates by the government of Ethiopia.