Minh Do was part of the first generation of Vietnamese students who went abroad to study as the Southeast Asian country began to liberalize its economy and society in the early 1990s. Do, who was born a year before war with the United States ended in 1975, says his youthful interest in mathematics coincided with his country’s growing commitment to education.
“I was fascinated by math and it is also very suited for a poor, developing country like Vietnam because you don’t need to have a lot of investment; it’s really just paper and pencil,” Do said. “I was in this gifted class and was trained to solve math problems. So I went through a lot of competitions, and ultimately trained on the national team.”
Eventually, Do and his team competed at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Sweden, where he won a Silver Medal.
“I saw that the living standards there were far more than what we had in Vietnam,” Do said. “It opened up my perspective. And I saw the importance of engineering, not just solving problems, but how to make things too.
“I was 18-years-old at that point and I was just getting ready to go to college. It helped to shape my perspective. I said ‘well, I want to be able to go into engineering, to make products, and really have an impact on people’s lives and mathematics is not sufficient to do that.’ We started to be able to read foreign magazines and I got really drawn to engineering.”
Do won a scholarship from the Australian government that allowed him to earn an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Canberra. He then went to Switzerland to earn a Ph.D. in Communications Systems.
Do joined the faculty at Illinois in 2002. He is a member of Beckman’s Image Formation and Processing group and an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with joint appointments at the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Bioengineering, in addition to Beckman.
As a younger faculty member and researcher, Do has already won many honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Young Author Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and has been voted by his students to the Teachers Ranked as Excellent List.
When it comes to his research mission, Do remains true to the motivation that first steered him toward engineering as a young man back in Vietnam.
“I had read that the engineering disciplines involved innovation and how that changed people’s lives,” Do said. “So I thought ‘maybe I want to build something like computer systems or software.’”
