I was born and grew up in Ethiopia -- a country in the East of Africa.

I studied Information Science at the School of Information Studies for Africa (SISA), later known as Faculty of Informatics in Addis Ababa University (AAU) and graduated with Master of Science in Information Science in 2002. Later, I was employed in the Faculty of Informatics at the rank of Lecturer and I served the University in various capacities until I left for Germany in 2005 to pursue my Ph.D. I received my Ph.D. in engineering in June 2009 from Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany.

Currently, I am working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science in the Computational Linguistics research group at the University of Toronto. I worked on a project that aimed to improve automatic speech recognition for individuals with dysarthria. Dysarthric individuals are able to comprehend natural language, but lack the articulatory control and coordination to produce intelligible speech. Their speech is characterized by imprecise articulation, deviant pronunciation, slurred voice, and reduced intelligibility. If properly tailored, automatic speech recognition can be very useful for people with dysarthria despite their considerably atypical speech.

Recently, I am working on a research project of speech-to-speech (S2S) translation between English and Inuktitut (a Canadian Indigenous language) in healthcare domain.