Vietnam Boat Refugee to Reliability Engineering
- Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and SUNY Buffalo.
- The fall of Saigon in 1975 triggered a mass exodus from Vietnam.
- In January 1980,at age 19,Pham learned that someone in the United States had agreed to sponsor him for entry.
Hoang Pham has spent his career trying to ensure that some of the world’s most critical systems don’t fail, including commercial aircraft engines, nuclear facilities, and massive data centers that underpin AI and cloud computing.
A professor of industrial and systems engineering at rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and a longtime volunteer for IEEE, Pham, an IEEE Life Fellow, is internationally recognized for advancing the mathematical foundations of reliability engineering. His work earned him the IEEE Reliability Society’s Engineer of the Year award in 2009. He was recognized for helping to shape how engineers model risk in complex, data-rich systems.
Hoang Pham
Employer
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
Job title
Professor of industrial and systems engineering
Member grade
Life Fellow
Alma maters
Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and SUNY Buffalo.
The discipline that defines his career was forged long before equations, peer-reviewed journals, or keynote speeches.It began on an overcrowded fishing boat in 1979 when he was fleeing Vietnam after the war, when survival as one of the country’s “boat people” depended on endurance, luck, and the fragile reliability of a vessel never meant to carry so many lives. Like thousands of others, he fled from his war-torn country after the fall of Saigon, which was controlled by communist North Vietnamese forces.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975,Pham and his son Hoang Jr.-a Rutgers computer science graduate turned filmmaker-produced Unstoppable Hope, a documentary about Vietnam’s boat people.The film tells t
The fall of Saigon in 1975 triggered a mass exodus from Vietnam. Many fled, hoping to escape the new communist regime. They faced perilous journeys, often crammed into small, overcrowded boats. The United Nations provided basic rations.Still, the asylum seekers’ futures remained uncertain. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that between 1975 and the early 1990s, roughly 800,000 Vietnamese people attempted to escape by boat. As many as 250,000 did not survive the harrowing journey.
Starting over with nothing
In January 1980,at age 19,Pham learned that someone in the United States had agreed to sponsor him for entry. He soon boarded an airplane for the first time and landed in Seattle.
his troubles weren’t over, however. he arrived in a city blanketed by snow, wearing thin clothing and carrying only a spare shirt. The frosty weather wasn’t his greatest concern, though. During his first two months, he spent most of his time in a hospital, recovering from malaria and other diseases. And he spoke no English.
Still,Pham-who had been a first-year college student in Vietnam-refused to abandon his goal of becoming a teacher. He enrolled at Lincoln high School to gain English proficiency and position himself to enter an American college. One teacher allowed him to test into a calculus class despite his limited English-which he passed.
“That moment told me I could survive here,” Pham says.
Within months, he learned he could attend college on a scholarship. He moved to Chicago in August 1980 to study at the National College of Education,then he transferred to Northeastern Illinois University, also in Chicago, earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science in 1982.
Encouraged by mentors, he earned a master’s degree in statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, followed by a Ph.D. in reliability engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1989.
when failure is not an option
Pham’s research direction crystallized in 1988 while searching for a dissertation topic.He was reading the January 1988 issue of IEEE Spectrum and had a flash of inspiration after seeing a classified ad posted by the