Vietnamese scholar named Australia’s most influential organic chemistry researcher

The ministry’s State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese announced last Friday that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Thi Thu Hang had sent a congratulatory letter to Associate Professor Nguyen Thanh Vinh of the University of New South Wales after he was honored by the daily newspaper The Australian as the most influential researcher in Australia in the field of organic chemistry.

In her letter, Hang expressed warm congratulations on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saying that the recognition was a well-deserved result of Vinh’s serious, persistent and dedicated scientific career.

She said the honor also reflects the growing integration capacity and academic reputation of Vietnamese scholars in the international scientific community.

The deputy minister emphasized that Vinh’s achievement would inspire the Vietnamese intellectual community in Australia, in Vietnam, and in other countries.

On the occasion, she also invited him and his family to attend the Homeland Spring 2026 program, an annual Lunar New Year gathering organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for overseas Vietnamese.

Vinh was born in 1982 and is widely known in Vietnam as the runner-up of the first season of ‘Duong len dinh Olympia’ (Road to Olympia), a long-running television knowledge competition produced by Vietnam Television in coordination with the Ministry of Education and Training.

The show aims to discover and honor outstanding high school students across the country and has been on air since March 1999.

In 2001, Vinh moved to Sydney to study industrial chemistry at the University of New South Wales.

He later earned his PhD in organic chemistry from the Australian National University in Canberra.

In 2010, he went to Germany for postdoctoral research under the Alexander von Humboldt scholarship.

Three years later, he returned to Australia and established an independent research group at Curtin University.

Since 2015, he has been a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, becoming a senior lecturer three years later and being promoted to associate professor in 2022.