Araya is an associate professor of global health and development at the School of Public Health at Mekelle University, Tigrai/ Ethiopia. He has twenty years of work experience in academics, research, and social transformation activities. His research career focuses on multidisciplinary and implementation research that integrates health systems, maternal and newborn health, health systems leadership and governance, health policy, digital Health, and social transformation. Methodologically, he is an expert in implementation research, diffusion of innovations and scale –up of proven health interventions.
He has led a number of implementation research projects which are multidisciplinary and internationally funded projects. He has published about 80 articles in reputable and peer reviewed journals. Currently, he advises and mentors ten PhD students in health systems and digital health. he is serving as head of the Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive and Child health (MARCH) Research Center of Mekelle university.
He is a senior researcher at the Digital Health Research and Development Center at the same university. He is a supervisor for PhD students at the Globalization. Access, Innovation and Care (GAIC) PhD network which is affiliated with Tilburg University and Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead the Health Resilience peer group of the network. He is Health Care Leadership (HLA) scholar of the Year 2022-23. In the Saving Little Lives (SLL) Implementation Research consortium, Araya works as principal investigator (PI) for the Tigrai SLL project.