Ms Nguyen Thi Minh Hoa

Born in 1984 in Hanoi, Hoa was a student in the physics majoring class at the High School for the Gifted in Natural Sciences under Hanoi National University. She entered the Physics Faculty of the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences.

However, not all students in the physics majoring class studied physics at higher education levels. According to Hoa, only a few students have become physicists.

Hoa was influenced by her older sister, who also studied physics and received a doctorate in the US, and by Prof Bach Thanh Cong, who encouraged her to follow physics research.

After graduating from Hanoi University of Natural Sciences, Hoa left Vietnam for Osaka University where she obtained a master’s degree and doctorate. Later, she became a postdoc student at Julich Center in Germany. 

Hoa’s husband is also a physicist. He was a classmate of Hoa at university. However, after finishing university, he studied in the US, while Hoa was in Japan. Later, they met in Germany when both of them followed postdoc study and were married.

However, after five years of working in Germany, Hoa and her husband in early 2017 decided to return to Vietnam. They made the decision after state and school policies began to make big investments in scientific research.

“The income from scientific research in Vietnam cannot help someone to be comfortably off. But it is enough to live. And this is enough for us,” Hoa said.

She said that the current conditions, from facilities to expenditures, in Vietnam are incomparable with that in Japan and Germany. However, she believes with the new policies, scientists will be able to fulfill their works well.

Hoa has had seven scientific research articles published in ISI journals and she is the main author of all the articles. The latest one, ‘Time evolution of the Kondo resonance in response to a quench’, published in Physical Review Letters, opens new directions for research.

Pham Thanh Huy, head of AIST, Hoa and two other young PhDs applied for and were hired for the posts of researcher at the same time. All of them had more than nine years of studying and researching overseas (Germany, the US and Singapore). 

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