He is the general director of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale (INRB).

[7] He earned a PhD in virology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, working on viral infections with mouse models.

[2] He took the blood of a sick nurse, which was sent for analysis at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, then to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where Peter Piot used the sample to discover Ebola.

[9] That version of events, regarding his role in the 1976 outbreak, was later refuted in a 2016 scientific article he co-signed with some of the remaining actors of that first epidemic.

[8] In 1981 Muyembe joined the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

[14] He recognised the sociocultural challenges of Ebola, encouraging hospitals to improve their infection control and community engagement.

[8] He has chaired the international committees that looked to control the Ebola outbreaks in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

[17] In 2014, he was appointed by Director General Margaret Chan to the WHO Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L.

In 2017 he partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency to build a research complex with several biosafety labs.

[7] On April 3, 2020, during a press conference in Kinshasa, Muyembe advocated for the trial in DRC of experimental vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in the midst of a major pandemic, generating a serious backlash from the Congolese population;[23] he eventually backtracked, saying that there had been a misunderstanding.