Professor Thuc-Quyen Nguyen FRSC

I first learned chemistry in 8th grade and remember falling in love with the periodic table. In the village, there was no chemistry laboratory. My first chemistry experiment was in my kitchen. I was in charge of grocery shopping and cooking for my family. I was curious about the red colour of watermelon or the yellow-orange colour of turmeric. One day, I bought one kilogram of turmeric root, peeled, grinded, added water to extract the yellow-orange colour, then I simmered in a pot to evaporate water and collected the yellow-orange powder. It took many years later for me to know the chemical structure of the pigment in turmeric – curcumin or diferuloylmethane.

The person who inspired me to become a teacher is my mother. My mother was a math teacher in middle school in small villages in Vietnam. I was born and grew up during the final years of the Vietnam War. I remembered bullets lighting up the sky at night and running to a bomb shelter every time I heard a siren. Our house burned down during the war and we lost everything. My mother could not afford to put her children in daycare. She brought us to her classroom and my sisters and I played quietly in the back of the classroom or at the door where she could see us. One day, I got bored playing with my sisters so I stood at the door and listened to her lecture. She was so good. I thought "when I grow up, I want to be just like her". I was 6 years old.

I was raised in Vietnamese villages to become a mother and a wife so a personal highlight for me is to come to the United States, to get a PhD and to have a career in science.

Professionally, a recent highlight is the opportunity to help establish the VinFuture Foundation (https://vinfutureprize.org/) in Vietnam to honour scientific and technological breakthroughs that create meaningful changes in everyday life of millions of people. Besides the Grand Prize and the Special Prize for outstanding achievements in emerging fields, VinFuture also dedicates two Special Prizes for outstanding female innovators and exceptional researchers in a developing country.

I have faced many challenges in life. I grew up in villages in Vietnam lacking of all basic needs such as clean water, electricity, food, etc. At the age of 21, I immigrated to the US with my family through the Humanization Organization (HO) program with a few words of English. I faced discrimination and people looked down on me because I was a poor immigrant. However, the more challenges I faced, the harder I tried. I used every setback and hurdle as a motivation to move forward, and within 10 years arriving to the US with a few words of English, I received a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles in Physical Chemistry.