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 the stories of a dozen refugees who, like Pham, survived perilous escapes and went on to build successful lives in the United States.
Growing up during the Vietnam War
Pham was born in Bình Thuận, Vietnam. His parents had only a little formal education, having grown up in the 1930s, when schooling was rare. To support their eight children, his parents ran a factory making bricks by hand. Despite their limited means, his parents held an unshakable belief that education was the surest path to a better life.
From an early age, Pham gravitated toward mathematics. Computers were scarce, but numbers and logic came naturally to him. He imagined becoming a teacher or professor and gradually began thinking about how mathematics could be applied to practical problems—how abstract reasoning might improve daily life.
His intellectual curiosity unfolded amid frequent danger. He grew up during the Vietnam War, when dodging gunfire in his province was routine. The 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the full scale of the conflict, making it clear that violence was not an interruption to life but a condition of it.
Pham recalls that after the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, conditions worsened dramatically. Families without ties to the new government, especially those who operated small businesses, found it increasingly dangerous to work, study, or apply for jobs, he says. People began vanishing. Many attempted to escape by boat, knowing the risks: imprisonment if caught or potentially death at sea.
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