Dr. Yonas Seifu completed his BSc in Electrical Engineering at Hawassa University in 2007, and after working as a supervising engineer at Ethiopian Telcom. Corp., earned the joint International Masters Degree in Computer Science and Networking from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) and University of Pisa, Italy in 2010, graduating with 110/110 sum cum laude in 2012. He then joined the PhD in Emerging Digital Technologies (Photonic Technologies Curriculum) at the SSSA, completing his doctoral thesis with 100/100 sum cum laude in 2016. Currently, he is an assistant professor of Electronic Engineering at the Institute of Mechanical Intelligence of the SSSA with research and academic activities focused on advanced fiber optic sensing systems. His more than 30 research contributions have been published in high-impact factor journals and relevant international conferences.
Since 2019, Dr. Muanenda has been participating in and coordinating the Erasmus+ cooperation between the Addis Ababa Institute of Technology in Ethiopia and the SSSA, having already made three staff missions for teaching and training in the area of ICT. He is also one of five experts living in Europe constituting a team in an EU Diaspora for Development program at Wollo University in northern Ethiopia, helping develop a pilot educational platform and deliver targeted training in ICT for agriculture and environmental monitoring. As part of his active and continued engagement in community support, Dr. Muanenda has also coordinated his fellow diaspora members living in Europe and the US in delivering educational materials to a pre-college school and basic medical supplies to a health center during the COVID-19 pandemic, both of them located in a rural community in southern Ethiopia.