From Vietnam Boat Refugee to Reliability Engineering

The self-discipline that defines his profession was solid 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 conflict, 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 1000’s 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 pc 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 mother and father had solely a bit of formal training, having grown up within the Nineteen Thirties, when education was uncommon. To help their eight youngsters, his mother and father ran a manufacturing unit making bricks by hand. Regardless of their restricted means, his mother and father held an unshakable perception that training was the surest path to a greater life.

From an early age, Pham gravitated towards arithmetic. Computer systems have been scarce, however numbers and logic got here naturally to him. He imagined turning into a instructor or professor and step by step started fascinated with how arithmetic might be utilized to sensible issues—how summary reasoning may enhance day by day life.

His mental curiosity unfolded amid frequent hazard. He grew up in the course of the Vietnam Battle, when dodging gunfire in his province was routine. The 1968 Tet Offensive uncovered the complete 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, circumstances 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, research, or apply for jobs, he says. Folks started vanishing. Many tried to flee by boat, figuring out the dangers: imprisonment if caught or doubtlessly loss of life at sea.

A profitable escape

In June 1979, on the peak of Vietnam’s storm season, Pham’s mom made an agonizing determination. She positioned Pham, then 18 years previous, onto a small, overcrowded fishing vessel within the hope that he may 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 almost not possible. Seasickness overwhelmed many passengers, and he remembers dropping consciousness shortly after departure. Meals was scarce, and protected ingesting water was almost nonexistent. Violent storms battered the vessel, and pirates loomed.

“Each second felt like a battle in opposition to nature, destiny, and inside despair,” Pham says.

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

After two weeks, Malaysian authorities transferred the refugees to a transit camp, the place the United Nations supplied fundamental rations. Nonetheless, the asylum seekers’ futures remained unsure. It’s estimated by the U.N. Refugee Company that between 1975 and the early 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 america 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, nonetheless. He arrived in a metropolis blanketed by snow, sporting 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 school scholar in Vietnam—refused to desert his aim of turning into a instructor, he says. He enrolled at Lincoln Excessive College to be able to achieve English proficiency and place himself to enter an American school. One instructor 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 school on a scholarship. He moved to Chicago in August 1980 to check on the Nationwide School of Schooling, then he transferred to Northeastern Illinois College, additionally in Chicago, incomes bachelor’s levels in arithmetic and pc science in 1982.

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

When failure is just not an possibility

Pham’s analysis course crystallized in 1988 whereas trying to find a dissertation subject. He was studying the January 1988 difficulty of IEEE Spectrum and had a flash of inspiration after seeing a categorised advert posted by the U.S. Protection Division’s Naval Underwater System Heart (now often called the Naval Undersea Warfare Heart). The advert requested, “Can your theories resolve the unsolvable?” It centered on the reliability of undersea communication and fight decision-making programs.

The advert revealed to him that establishments have been actively making use of arithmetic and statistics to resolve engineering issues. Pham says he nonetheless retains a replica of that Spectrum difficulty 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 below improvement.

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

His want to turn out to be an teacher by no means left him, nonetheless. In 1993 he joined Rutgers as an assistant professor of commercial and programs engineering.

At the moment his analysis focuses on reliability in trendy, data-intensive programs, together with AI infrastructure and international knowledge facilities.

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

Charting his IEEE journey

Pham joined IEEE in 1985 as a scholar 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 Journal from 1992 to 2000, was a visitor editor for a particular difficulty 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 Worldwide Symposium on System Integration.

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

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