Growing up in a small town in Vietnam, I was used to watching my parents work from dawn to dusk

to have enough money to feed their five children. Fortunately, my parents realized that education is
the only way for me to have a better life. Motivated by my parent’s sacrifice, I tried my best to study
with the kind of determination, drive, and sense of responsibility. When I was in high school,
through reading articles, I realized more and more clearly the importance of the value that knowledge
brings. At that time, I was very surprised to an article about the devaluation of agriculture products
after having a season on. In many orchards, farmers harvest dragon fruits, watermelons to feed fish
and livestock, or mangoes and oranges that are dumped in landfills because the market for
agricultural products in China is cut off and the quality of the product is not good enough to export to
US and European markets. In other words, farmers do not know how to increase the value of
agricultural products or convert it into more valuable and preserved products such as dried fruits, tea,
and fermented beverage, etc. The difficulties of the people as well as the slow development of
science and technology in Vietnam always concern me from the bottom of my heart.

Dedicating myself to making a positive change for Vietnamese science, I enrolled to study
biotechnology at University of Science, the top university in scientific study and research in
Vietnam. At that time, research on the application of biology products developed from recombinant
protein technology in Vietnam was a very promising area such as the application of insulin, PDGF in
the treatment of diabetes patients, using recombinant probiotic as animal feed helps to strengthen the
immune system and improve productivity in livestock. I focused my mind on studying subjects such
as Genetic Engineering, Gene Engineering, Microbial Biotechnology and did a thesis related to
recombinant proteins at the Molecular and Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory to prepare for
the future work.

My graduation thesis was to optimizing production of recombinant human platelet-derived growth

factor type BB (rhPDGF-BB) in the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris in pilot scale. The
advantage of this strain is to ultilize methanol as its carbon source to grow to very high cell densities
and also as an inducer for protein expression. However, one of limitation with the industrial enzyme
production using P. pastoris is being methanol accumulated that causes inhibition of protein
expression. Indeed, when I up-scaled from 15 to 50 liter fed-batch fermentation with gradually
increasing methanol feed rate, I noticed that the yeast quickly ran into the death phase and got low
expression levels. To overcome this inhibition, I searched all the papers related to large scale
fermentation, the impact of methanol concentration and researched about the different methanol
feeding strategies on several popular article like NCBI, Nature, frontier in Microbiology, and also
wrote my question on ResearchGate. Simultaneously, experiments were conducted to understand the
relationship between growth process, methanol accumulation and energy metabolism in the
expression of rhPDGF-BB protein. After many days and sleepless nights in the laboratory,
calculations, analysis, and so much experimenting, I figured out that the methanol feed rate is the key
point to the methanol accumulation and the ineffectiveness of the continuous methanol addition
strategy. Based on studies of methanol inhibition thresholds, I started modifying this strategy by
adding methanol only when the medium was exhausted, and that was detected by the dissolved
oxygen (DO) concentration indicator. However, the fermenter does not have a DO alarm system to
warn of a DO change that exceeds a defined threshold. After collecting the real-time DO data, the
output need to be analysed to detect the methanol exhaustion that control methanol pumps adding
automatically. This limitation prevented my experiments from working as intended because the
methanol depletion detection was not timed properly. While I was looking for a way to solve the
problem on time, my mentor focuses on researching the monitoring system and programming the DO
alarm which can automate the methanol feeding process. This strategy not only gave successful
results, nearly ten times expression levels higher than the traditional strategy, but greatly inspired me
in the application of information technology in biological research.

After my graduation, the outbreak of covid-19 in Vietnam culminated leading to a sharp increase in
demand for covid diagnostics. At the moment, I worked as R&D staff in the Khoa Thuong
Biotechnology company whose strong research and application diagnostic kits is anchored in
Vietnam. In the research team, I learned how to use tools that support the primer/probe design
process such as finding regions of local similarity between sequences by BLAST, building PCR
consensus region based on dataset by NCBI-MSA or Geneious, detecting the primer
mishybridization to eliminate false positive in PCR by ThermoBlast. By using these tools, the job of
selecting primer/probe and optimizing the PCR reaction is done faster. In addition to my research
work, I also had the opportunity to train lab technicians on RT-qPCR techniques. In order to shorten
the time of analyzing results for technicians, I tried to build an automatic result return tool based on
the Ct value obtained from RT-qPCR. I tried to learn python language by myself to write the tool.
Although I don't have much experience in programming and my code is still not optimized, I am still
very proud of the tool I have written. This job experience greatly enriches my perspectives of
bioinformatics potential in biotechnology development.

While being excited by what I am doing, I realize that my current knowledge is not enough for me to
contribute to the development of bioinformatics industry in Vietnam. With my work and research
experience, I would like to further develop myself academically by pursuit my MSc studies in the
Bioinformatic and Structural Biology program. After thoroughly inquire information about the
National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, I am really impressed with long-term history of education,
outstanding research achievements including the success NTHU's student in Nobel Prize in Physics,
Chemistry, that are the clearest proof of the quality and prestige of NTHU. I believe that the
knowledge that this program provides about Molecular Biology, Biological Database, Structural
Genomics will be highly useful in my future study. Furthermore, Professor Hsiao-Han's research
areas in the application of data analysis and mathematical modeling, genetics to study the evolution
and transmission of pathogens also the research interest I am pursuing. These studies would be
valuable for public health, very interesting and promising area.

In short, I recognize that my academic achievement is due to my hard work and perseverance while
motivated by challenges. Obtaining a Master's scholarship from the the National Tsing Hua
University in Taiwan will be a great opportunity for me to expand my knowledge and skills, to helps
me fully explore myself and realize my potential. I hope that with all the efforts in my research path,
I can contribute to the advancement of science and benefit society.