Biruk Zenebe Bekele

Biruk Zenebe Bekele is a medical doctor from Ethiopia pursuing an MSc in Applied Digital Health at the University of Oxford. He is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar and a member of Harris Manchester College. His interests centre on health systems, digital innovation, and building solutions that improve access to care.

He trained at Addis Ababa University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. During medical school, he became increasingly interested in the systems around patients as much as in disease itself, asking why care breaks down, where people fall through the cracks, and what simple fixes might close those gaps.

Biruk describes himself as an engineer at heart. He taught himself programming at a young age, starting with HTML and later Python and Java, and brought that interest into clinical work. He has helped implement an EMR in the operating theatre, built an AI-assisted training tool for nerve conduction studies, and designed digital workflows that improved patient accountability in the emergency department. His team also won Ethiopia’s first Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab hackathon for using AI to build high-value health systems.

He works as a General Practitioner and clinical coordinator at the Lydia Getaneh Foundation, where he is part of building an oncology centre designed to make cancer care accessible regardless of a patient’s socioeconomic status. Designing patient pathways and digital systems from scratch has reinforced his view that good healthcare is built through systems as much as bedside care.

Outside medicine, Biruk continues to explore new technologies, including AI agents, data science, and 3D printing. He hopes to use his time at Oxford to turn fragmented health data into outcomes patients can feel, and to build systems where access to good care depends on design and equity, not luck.