From Vietnam Boat Refugee to Reliability Engineering

The self-discipline that defines his profession was cast lengthy earlier than equations, peer-reviewed journals, or keynote speeches. It started on an overcrowded fishing boat in 1979 when he was fleeing Vietnam after the battle, when survival as one of many nation’s “boat folks” relied on endurance, luck, and the delicate reliability of a vessel by no means meant to hold so many lives. Like hundreds of others, he fled from his war-torn nation after the fall of Saigon, which was managed by communist North Vietnamese forces.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the autumn of Saigon in 1975, Pham and his son Hoang Jr.—a Rutgers laptop science graduate turned filmmaker—produced Unstoppable Hope, a documentary about Vietnam’s boat folks. The movie tells the tales of a dozen refugees who, like Pham, survived perilous escapes and went on to construct profitable lives within the United States.

Pham was born in Bình Thuận, Vietnam. His dad and mom had solely a bit formal schooling, having grown up within the Thirties, when education was uncommon. To help their eight youngsters, his dad and mom ran a manufacturing facility making bricks by hand. Regardless of their restricted means, his dad and mom held an unshakable perception that schooling was the surest path to a greater life.

From an early age, Pham gravitated towards mathematics. Computer systems have been scarce, however numbers and logic got here naturally to him. He imagined turning into a trainer or professor and step by step started excited about how arithmetic may very well be utilized to sensible issues—how summary reasoning would possibly enhance every day life.

His mental curiosity unfolded amid frequent hazard. He grew up throughout the Vietnam Warfare, when dodging gunfire in his province was routine. The 1968 Tet Offensive uncovered the total scale of the battle, making it clear that violence was not an interruption to life however a situation of it.

Pham recollects that after the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, situations worsened dramatically. Households with out ties to the brand new authorities, particularly those that operated small companies, discovered it more and more harmful to work, examine, or apply for jobs, he says. Folks started vanishing. Many tried to flee by boat, realizing the dangers: imprisonment if caught or doubtlessly loss of life at sea.

A profitable escape

In June 1979, on the top of Vietnam’s hurricane season, Pham’s mom made an agonizing resolution. She positioned Pham, then 18 years previous, onto a small, overcrowded fishing vessel within the hope that he would possibly attain freedom.

The boat, which was designed to hold about 100 folks, departed with 275.

Pham’s 12-day journey was harrowing. He was confined to the decrease deck, which was packed so tightly that motion was practically inconceivable. Seasickness overwhelmed many passengers, and he remembers shedding consciousness shortly after departure. Meals was scarce, and secure drinking water was practically nonexistent. Violent storms battered the vessel, and pirates loomed.

“Each second felt like a battle towards nature, destiny, and inner despair,” Pham says.

The boat ultimately washed ashore on a distant island off the Malaysian coast. Arriving at a refugee camp supplied little aid; meals and clear water have been scarce, illness unfold quickly, and practically everybody—together with Pham—contracted malaria. Loss of life got here nearly nightly.

After two weeks, Malaysian authorities transferred the refugees to a transit camp, the place the United Nations supplied primary rations. Nonetheless, the asylum seekers’ futures remained unsure. It’s estimated by the U.N. Refugee Agency that between 1975 and the early Nineteen Nineties, roughly 800,000 Vietnamese folks tried to flee by boat. As many as 250,000 didn’t survive the harrowing journey, the company estimates.

Beginning over with nothing

In January 1980, at age 19, Pham discovered that somebody in the US had agreed to sponsor him for entry, he says. He quickly boarded an airplane for the primary time and landed in Seattle.

His troubles weren’t over, nevertheless. He arrived in a metropolis blanketed by snow, carrying skinny clothes and carrying solely a spare shirt. The frosty climate was not his best concern, although. Throughout his first two months, he spent most of his time in a hospital, recovering from malaria and different ailments. And he spoke no English.

Nonetheless, Pham—who had been a first-year faculty pupil in Vietnam—refused to desert his purpose of turning into a trainer, he says. He enrolled at Lincoln High School with a purpose to acquire English proficiency and place himself to enter an American faculty. One trainer allowed him to check right into a calculus class regardless of his restricted English—which he handed.

“That second informed me I might survive right here,” Pham says.

Inside months, he discovered he might attend faculty on a scholarship. He moved to Chicago in August 1980 to review on the National College of Education, then he transferred to Northeastern Illinois University, additionally in Chicago, incomes bachelor’s levels in arithmetic and laptop science in 1982.

Inspired by mentors, he earned a grasp’s diploma in statistics on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, adopted by a Ph.D. in reliability engineering on the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1989.

When failure is just not an choice

Pham’s analysis path crystallized in 1988 whereas looking for a dissertation subject. He was studying the January 1988 problem of IEEE Spectrum and had a flash of inspiration after seeing a categorised advert posted by the U.S. Defense Department’s Naval Underwater System Heart (now often known as the Naval Undersea Warfare Center). The advert requested, “Can your theories remedy the unsolvable?” It centered on the reliability of undersea communication and fight decision-making techniques.

The advert revealed to him that establishments have been actively making use of arithmetic and statistics to unravel engineering issues. Pham says he nonetheless retains a replica of that Spectrum problem in his workplace.

After finishing his Ph.D., he joined Boeing as a senior specialist engineer at its Renton, Wash., facility, engaged on engine reliability for the 777 plane, which was beneath improvement.

He labored there for 18 months, then accepted a senior engineering specialist place on the Idaho National Laboratory, in Idaho Falls, the place he labored on nuclear techniques.

His want to change into an teacher by no means left him, nevertheless. In 1993 he joined Rutgers as an assistant professor of commercial and techniques engineering.

Immediately his analysis focuses on reliability in fashionable, data-intensive techniques, together with AI infrastructure and world data centers.

“The issue now isn’t getting knowledge,” he says. “It’s realizing which knowledge to belief.”

Charting his IEEE journey

Pham joined IEEE in 1985 as a pupil member and credit the group with shaping a lot of his skilled life. IEEE supplied a platform for scholarship, collaboration, and visibility at vital moments in his profession, he says.

He served as affiliate technical editor of IEEE Communications Magazine from 1992 to 2000, was a visitor editor for a particular problem on fault-tolerant software program within the June 1993 IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and was this system vice chair of the annual IEEE Reliability and Maintainability Symposium in 1994. In 2024 he returned to Vietnam as a plenary speaker on the sixteenth IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration.

Along with being named a distinguished professor at Rutgers, he served as chair of the industrial and systems engineering department from 2007 to 2013.

“If my journey holds one lesson,” he says, “it’s this: Wrestle builds resilience, and resilience makes the extraordinary attainable. Even in darkness, perseverance lights the best way.”