Getu has been with the Danforth Center since January 2012. As the Cassava Pipeline Research Manager, his responsibilities include managing molecular and trait characterization of transgenic lines for the VIRCA and BioCassava Plus projects and supervising production and quality control of genetic constructs in both cassava projects. He also supervises the technical staff performing plant analysis in the IICI Trait Improvement Laboratory and provides mentoring and technical support to visiting scholars. Before joining the Danforth Center, Getu worked at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa as a postdoctoral fellow on the African Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) project, hosted by Pioneer Hi-Bred/DuPont, and at Texas AgriLife Research (part of Texas A&M University Systems), where he worked on the development of abiotic stress tolerant Saccharum spp. Getu obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Plant Sciences from Alemaya University, Ethiopia, where he served as a lecturer. He earned his Ph.D. at the Forestry Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. 

His research involves Agricultural Plant Science, Biotechnology