Desalew is a Research Fellow in Applied Geoinformatics, Department of Geography. His main research interest revolved around environmental modeling, with a particular emphasis on hydrology, soil, and land-use. He also had a keen interest in the field of remote sensing and geospatial visualization.

Desalew completed Mobititas pluss postdoctoral research grant with our Landscape Geoinformatics working group, where he worked on modeling the impacts of land-use and climate change on flow regime.