He earned his Ph.D. in international health and development from the University of Helsinki Finland (2004). Prior to joining Northeastern Wamai was a research fellow in the Takemi Program in International Health at the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to that Wamai was a research associate at Oxford University Department of Social Policy. Wamai has previously worked in a number of institutions including the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Public Policy and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the World Bank, the London School of Economics, the Nordic-Africa Institute in Sweden, and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Wamai conducts research in the areas of HIV/AIDS, neglected and infectious tropical diseases (NTDs) and health systems and policy.