Dr Lupwayi, a soil microbiologist, started his career as an academic at the University of Malawi. He then worked as a Research Associate at the International Livestock Research Institute in Ethiopia before moving to Canada, where he is a Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. He has published 144 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. His work has been consumed heavily by peers, as indicated by his H-index of 32 (Scopus) or 42 (Google Scholar). He has served on the Editorial Boards of the Canadian Journal of Soil Science, where he rose to become Editor-in-Chief, Agronomy Journal, and Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment. Besides reviewing manuscripts for many international journals, he has reviewed research proposals for national research councils of Canada, France and the Netherlands. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Soil Science. 

Dr. Lupwayi has used his expertise to contribute to African science. At the University of Malawi, he supervised undergraduate student projects and mentored an MSc student. From his work in Ethiopia, he published many papers on rock phosphate fertilizers (important phosphorus sources for tropical crops which have difficulty accessing soil phosphorus due to its fixation by the highly weathered tropical soils), biological nitrogen fixation, and nutrient release from agroforestry shrubs and cattle manure. He also authored a manual on biological nitrogen fixation techniques, which was distributed to Eastern and Southern African scientists working on Phaseolus beans. While in Canada, he has reviewed manuscripts for the African Journal of Agricultural Research and African Journal of Plant Science. He has also presented papers at conferences in Africa: the International Symposium on Plant-Soil Interactions at Low pH (South Africa, 2001), the African Association for Biological Nitrogen Fixation Conference (Cameroon, 2009), the International Nitrogen Initiative Conference (Uganda, 2013), and the African Crop Science Conference (South Africa, 2018).