5 Vietnamese in the top 1% of the world's most influential scientists

According to Thomson Reuters, this year there are five Vietnamese people in the top of the world's most influential scientists, including Professor Nguyen Son Binh and Associate Professor Nguyen Xuan Hung for the third consecutive time.

As every year, through the website hcr.stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com, Thomson Reuters has published a list of 3,266 scientists in 21 natural science and social science fields with highly cited publications (Highly Cited Papers).

Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Xuan Hung in Belgium.

This list of scientists in the top 1% most cited was determined by Thomson Reuters based on the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) of a total of 128,887 highly cited articles in the period from 2004 to 2014.

Each publication of scientists ranked in the top 1% is calculated according to the distribution of the ESI index in each field and by year of publication. Thomson Reuters also selects a representative specialized journal for each research field and only considers publications in those journals. In the case of multidisciplinary journals such as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)..., it is calculated according to a separate analysis method.

Veteran faces

Thomson Reuters recorded five Vietnamese scientists among the world's most influential scientists in 2016, of which only oneAssociate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Xuan Hung(computer science) is a researcher with contacts in Vietnam. He is also one of two Vietnamese scientists to be in the top of the world's most influential scientists for three consecutive years: 2014, 2015, 2016.

As the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH) and a researcher at CMU Taichung Medical University (Taiwan), Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Xuan Hung focuses on researching and developing powerful computational tools and computer simulations, applied in the fields of Mechanical Engineering, Biomechanics, Materials... To date, he has more than 100 publications in ISI journals, of which 10 publications have a citation coefficient of over 100 (2).

With the Georg Forster Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), he went to Germany to conduct research collaboration with international colleagues from mid-2015 to early 2017. Notably, in 2016, he was sponsored by the Belgian government and the EU for two prestigious projects lasting at least four years to conduct research and train graduate students on topics related to climate change in Vietnam.

Professor Nguyen Son Binhteaches at the Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University and is a senior member of the Argonne National Laboratory.

Professor Nguyen Son Binh (far right) and his research team.

His research interests include inorganic/organic metal chemistry, organic synthesis, and polymer science, and he is also interested in environmentally friendly catalysts and biomaterials. The interdisciplinary research group he leads is divided into three teams with three main branches: Porous Materials, Graphene/Graphene Oxide, and Biomaterials (3).

Among the five Vietnamese scientists, there are two scientists who twice appeared in the list of influential scientists.Professor, Dr. Nguyen Thuc Quyen(chemistry) andProf. Dr. Vo Van Anh(mathematics).

Professor Nguyen Thuc Quyen (fifth from left) and her research team.

Prof. Nguyen Thuc Quyen is currently teaching at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California. Her current research and that of her colleagues mainly focuses on the electronic properties of conjugated polymer electrolytes, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, electron-hole generation and transport processes, self-assembling molecules, material fabrication processes, nanostructure analysis of organic solar cells, and biomaterials/bioelectronics. In 2015, she was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Principal Investigator.

Prof. Dr. Vo Van Anh teaches at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, majoring in Mathematical Sciences, Computational and Applied Mathematics. His current research projects include new methods in the theory and application of spherical random fields, spatiotemporal nonlinear diffusion processes with fractal multisystem characteristics, statistical estimation and approximation of anomalous diffusion, and the diffusion and transport of saltwater in coastal aquifers.

New factor

Compared with the four Vietnamese colleagues mentioned above,Dr. Tran Phan Lam Sonis a completely new name. Having been a PhD student in Hungary in 1997, Dr. Tran Phan Lam Son did his postdoctoral work at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) in 2001.

Dr. Tran Phan Lam Son interviewed by Japanese television station NHK.

In 2007, he was a principal investigator at the Soybean Biotechnology and Genomics Laboratory, National Center for Soybean Biotechnology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. Since 2009, he has been working at the RIKEN Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (Japan).

His main interests are decoding the molecular signals of plants in response to drought, salinity and heavy metal stress; mechanisms controlling nitrogen fixation in legumes under drought and phosphorus deficiency; functional genes of food crops to increase yield under adverse conditions.

According to VNN