​Tu Le graduated with an Honours Degree in Chemistry from Hanoi University in her home country Vietnam. Subsequently, she moved to Australia and obtained a PhD from Swinburne University in 2010 studying computational simulation of hyperbranched polymers. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which later was converted to a research scientist position working on a commercial project. Currently, Tu is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow from RMIT (Australia). She is also a founder and the Managing Science Director of the International Innovative Research Network, which organises scientific conferences with a focus on supporting researchers from developing countries.

"Sometimes growing up in less advantaged areas can give you skills that other people do not have."

How do you break the stereotypes in science?

​I was born in Vietnam, where I also completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry. I then came to Australia for my PhD. I know there are many students in Vietnam that would like to study overseas but cannot afford it. Also, there are many excellent students that performed there studies overseas and then go back to Vietnam, where they have limited opportunities to network with researchers from overseas due to the limited funding opportunities.

I also have two daughters. I have been lucky to work in an environment supportive of international colleagues and people with career breaks. I think in terms of my track record I am doing okay. I am competitive enough to do what I want to do, but career breaks have a massive effect on someone’s career. I used to take my kids and husband to international conferences, because I did not want to have a gap in my CV. There are some small grants of $200-300 to support carers, but that is not enough money to cover the childcare and sometimes the mother does not want to be separated from the child. Therefore, we need more grants to support families to go to conferences overseas.​
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Dr Tu Le with her family.

QUICK FIRE ROUND

What are the three qualities you would like to be remembered for?
Empowering, inspiring and kind

Cultural diversity in research
It is not just the language, it is also about the culture. In other countries there is also a different research culture, to have someone in the team that knows a different research culture can be extremely beneficial for collaborations.

What is your attitude towards failure?
Everyone fails sometimes. But I don’t take it as a bad thing. I take it as a lesson, rather than a failure. I will try to learn from it, so I will not repeat it again.

Otherwise, I guess my career path is quite traditional for a scientist. I completed my studies with a PhD, and then performed my postdoctoral studies. Both my parents are chemists. My mum is a polymer chemist and my dad is a computational chemist. I am a bit more influenced by my dad, but the main reason I am doing computational work is that I did not like to work in the lab. I really like chemistry, but I do not have the patience to perform the experiments in the lab.​

How do you support people from diverse backgrounds?

When my contract finished at CSIRO, I was considering doing something else, which was conference organising. I felt like there are not enough female speakers at conferences. Additionally, I wanted to help people from developing countries to attend good quality conferences by giving them travel and childcare grants. Back then, everyone was talking about developing academia and industry collaborations and I did not know where to start. I had no clue how to initiate an industry partnership and how to maintain and grow a collaboration with an industry partner. Therefore, I wanted to invite researchers from industry and learn how they want to collaborate with researchers from academia or research institutes. I also invited researchers that have had successful collaborations with academic partners to learn from their experience. This how the International Innovative Research Network conferences started and so far, we have organised 9-10 conferences over the last 3-4 years with attendees from about 30 different countries. 

We had one conference in Vietnam last year. I was amazed with the student’s ability to communicate their science in English. For people in my generation English was still a barrier. Some of the students approached me for research and PhD project opportunities. At this stage, I can’t really help them much with the research funding, but I can help them with the opportunity to network as a starting point. I hope my conferences will generate enough profit, that we can provide research grant in the future. Organising conferences is just the first step and I am just at the beginning of this journey. 
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Due to the conferences, I have also grown my research collaborations and network massively. I collaboration with researchers from both developing and developed countries. However, I mostly collaborate with researchers that originate from developing countries, who then moved to Europe or the United States.​

​If you could give one piece of advice to a young aspiring scientist, what would it be?

Do the things you like the most. But whatever you chose to do, you've got to work hard and become the best in what you do. Therefore, if someone wants to work with you, they can say that they work with the best in that particular area. It is important to work hard and not cut corners.
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Additionally, soft skills are vital. Especially the ability to community your science is so important as it will improve your job applications as well as your proposal for grants and awards. Communication is the key.