Building a Modern Chemistry Undergraduate Program at Hanoi

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Chapter 2

Building a Modern Chemistry Undergraduate Program at Hanoi University of Science-Vietnam National University: A Vietnam−U.S. Partnership Martin Gruebele,* James M. Lisy, Alexander Scheeline, and Steven C. Zimmerman Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 600 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, United States *E-mail: [email protected].

In 2007, the University of Illinois Chemistry Department entered an agreement with the Hanoi University of Science Chemistry Department (part of Vietnam National University) to modernize their chemistry curriculum. This was achieved by sending Illinois faculty to teach classes in Vietnam, introducing active learning, live demonstrations, U.S. textbooks and English language instruction into the curriculum. Illinois also provides undergraduate research positions and faculty training in the U.S., takes excellent students into the Illinois PhD program. The loop eventually closes when Vietnamese PhDs return to their home country to teach as chemistry faculty themselves. This chapter outlines the approach we took, provides some assessment data, and discusses the personal connections of the Illinois-Hanoi outreach program as a model for similar programs to build up chemical education infrastructure and foster international science education collaboration in interested countries.

© 2017 American Chemical Society Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Introduction Higher education in the U.S. has a long-standing focus on outreach into the community, ranging from lectures for the lay public to high school student summer research opportunities, to continuing teacher training in STEM fields to TED talks on the radio and internet. There have also been global scientific partnerships, such as ‘branch campuses’ of prominent universities abroad, bringing together U.S. researchers with their counterparts in host countries. Activities that impact global education have received less attention at the level of university departments, being left to campuses overall or national educational organizations. This makes it harder to achieve specific chemistry-oriented goals. Here we pose the question: What about modernizing the chemistry education of an entire country, especially one that was not always on friendly terms with the U.S., to become a potential global partner in science and technology? We discuss such an outreach program, conducted as a partnership between the chemistry departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC or Illinois), and Hanoi University of Science (HUS, affiliated with Vietnam National University, VNU). The HUS faculty realized that they needed to: modernize their curriculum and teaching methods; enable their students to communicate science in English, which has become the de facto language of scientific journals around the world; and to sustain the changes that graduates with a combined education at HUS and UIUC could make. This chapter discusses how the UIUC-HUS global outreach project was initiated, what were its various facets (e.g. undergraduates taught by Illinois faculty in Vietnam, summer undergraduate research at Illinois, PhD research at Illinois), and what we hope the future will bring. Our “East-West Partnership” was featured in a 2010 article by Celia Arnaud in C&EN (Arnaud, 2010) (1).

Getting the Program Started In the mid 1980s, Vietnam began a program of re-structuring — “ Đổi Mới,” or “Renovation,” loosely translated into English — to reintegrate Vietnam into the world community (Figure 1). Economic reform boosted productivity to annual GDP growth averaging about 6% between 1995 and 2015, with far less of a drop during the 2008 economic crisis than the international community in general (Data at data.worldbank.org). In 1995, the U.S. and Vietnam established normalized diplomatic relations, and by 2001, a bilateral trade agreement was signed. Economic and political reforms turned cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City into bustling centers of activity. As a consequence the unavoidable transition was made from roads filled with bicycles to roads jammed with vehicular traffic (not all imports from the West are great). It became clear to university administrators at HUS that STEM education would rapidly become a bottleneck to sustained growth as Vietnam attempted the direct leap into a modern technology-based economy. They contacted the UIUC Chancellor, and it quickly became apparent that a focused relationship at the department level would be the best way to start an outreach program between the two universities. By the end of 2006, a delegation from HUS, including Rector 16

Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Búi Duy Cam and Dean Luu Van Boi of Chemistry visited Illinois, and entered an agreement with Steven Zimmerman, then Department Head of Chemistry at Illinois. (Note that a Vietnamese “Dean”, like the German “Dekan,” leads a department. A Vietnamese “Rector,” like the German “Rektor,” leads the university or at least a whole faculty, such as the sciences.)

Figure 1. The contrast of past and future after the “renovation” program in Vietnam. Photo by Steven C. Zimmerman.

The goals of the collaborative undergraduate-level educational outreach program between the two chemistry departments were as follows: •

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• •

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To create an English-language undergraduate chemistry curriculum at HUS. English is the international language of science, and fluency in it is important for students who will eventually do research at the PhD level. To introduce modern teaching methods into the HUS chemistry curriculum, including a professor who freely ranges around the classroom instead of reading from a lectern; real-life chemical demonstrations; ‘inverted’ class rooms and lecture videos, slide shows, group discussion sessions, and internet use for materials. To facilitate summer undergraduate research experiences, by hosting students from HUS in UIUC-Chemistry labs. To provide students with training and competitive recommendations so they could participate in international PhD programs, including Illinois and elsewhere in the U.S. and world. To provide training of current HUS faculty in the U.S., as well as cultural exchange for both Illinois and HUS faculty.

These goals were outlined in the initial agreement between the two chemistry departments, and the program was off to a start with the arrival of Illinois professors to teach the K51 class of nearly 40 students in 2007. In the same year four HUS faculty came to the University of Illinois, attending multiple courses to gather course information and directly observe how the UIUC faculty teach their courses. For several subsequent semesters additional HUS faculty similarly spent a full semester at UIUC. 17 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Curriculum in Vietnam UIUC has sent a wide range of disciplinary chemistry faculty to Vietnam, including in organic chemistry (Anne M. Baranger), chemical biology, organic and materials chemistry (Steven C. Zimmerman), green chemistry (Patricia A. Shapley), physical and general chemistry (James M. Lisy, and Martin Gruebele, who did this as part of an outreach program inspired by the Cottrell Science Collaborative), and analytical chemistry (Alexander Scheeline). The program continues with visits from new faculty members, such as Prashant Jain (nanomaterials chemistry) planned for 2017. The most difficult part of preparing for successful outreach rested nonetheless on the shoulders of HUS. They had to get students ready to participate in a fastpaced, English-language classroom, which presented several challenges. The Vietnam secondary education system is quite rigorous, but not without its own problems. Whereas education is inexpensive, it has not been free in the past, and many poor families cannot afford secondary education. Schooling can be parttime, or be replaced by work full time, closing doors to higher education early on. The students from middle-class families that make it through the tough National High School Examination are often stressed by incredible work and study loads by the time they get to the university. Fortunately, the HUS Chemistry faculty are well aware of these problems, and this is an ongoing discussion for educators and the government in Hanoi. This ‘feeder’ problem is not one that Illinois could tackle, focusing instead on higher chemistry education at the undergraduate level. To prepare students for a rigorous and different-from-the-usual curriculum in English, HUS selected students that ranked highly in science tests, and also had basic language skills. English skills were further developed between high school and university by taking students out of regular high school at age 16 to 17, and entering them in a special English language program that lasted for a year. As one might expect, ≈35 students in the K51 class, the first to come from that preparatory curriculum to the HUS chemistry department for the HUS-Illinois program, were among the most outstanding science students in the country, but exhibited mixed English skills. Many had Science Olympiad Gold or Silver Medals, a very difficult honor to achieve, but language was not facile for all of them. Before we joined forces with our Vietnamese counterparts, chemistry classes were of course taught purely in Vietnamese. Although many faculty in Vietnam speak a foreign language, it is often Russian, or French, particularly for older faculty. A typical style was for a professor to read excerpts from a chemistry text standing at a lectern in front of the class, while students copied down notes, and the HUS faculty wanted to change that. After discussions with them in Illinois and Hanoi, the following system emerged as workable to introduce modern curriculum concepts. Type I: In an intense 2 to 3 week period, a U.S. faculty member would visit HUS and teach an entire class. About 3 one hour lectures per day were given in this intense program, covering freshman chemistry or introductory analytical chemistry. A faculty member from HUS would also be in class and help supervise/grade, thus absorbing some of the teaching techniques that were used. These classes had midterm and final exams that were very similar to 18 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


corresponding courses taught at Illinois, such as Chemistry 202 or Chemistry 204, the Accelerated Freshman Chemistry sequence at Illinois. 202/204 are taught to majors in chemical engineering and chemistry, with mostly an AP chemistry background. Type II: After agreeing on a textbook to use, and visiting Illinois for a semester to see how the courses were taught there, a HUS faculty member would be in charge of teaching the class in English. Using an inverted classroom, the Vietnamese students would first listen to brief video lectures recorded by the co-teaching faculty member from the U.S., and then the HUS professor would continue with lectures and discussions. One example of this format combined powerpoint lecture notes with video/audio from the faculty, in 10-15 minute portions, and upload them to iTunesU. An Illinois faculty member would then come for 1 to 2 weeks either in the middle of the class, or at the end, and teach part of the material. The schedule here was more relaxed, with two one hour lectures per day. This approach was used for instance to teach Chemistry 442 or 444, the physical chemistry quantum mechanics/electronic structure theory and thermodynamics/ statistical mechanics/kinetics courses. Both of these types received positive feedback from the students, with the more relaxed format generally preferred because it reduced the intensity of the daily load. We introduced many well-known curricular activities into the HUS chemistry curriculum, besides video lectures and inverted classrooms. Vietnam still has a reputation for ignoring U.S. copyrights. Entire textbooks are photocopied. One way to avoid either ignoring or enabling the problem is to use open access texts. The Quantitative Analysis class now uses (Harvey, 2009) (2) rather than (Harris, 2007) (3) for this reason. Course content was not affected by the change, and no comparison of student response was sought. We did extensive live demonstrations with materials available there. It turns out, for instance, that students had never seen a thermite reaction, or had a liquid-nitrogen-frozen rubber ball snapped in half. Many demonstrations that seem very obvious to U.S. educators had simply not been done before. Bringing a spectrophotometer into lecture to demonstrate its operation was treated as mildly revolutionary; bringing a potentiostat was beyond what could be allowed (due to the rarity of the instrument and fear for any harm it might suffer). The Vietnamese students, at least the ones selected for the program, had an almost child-like excitement for these demonstrations, and insisted that they be done over and over again while taking cell-phone photos and sending them to family and friends. Another example would be classroom discussions in the more conventional lecture format. Rather than standing on a podium and lecturing, we would ask students questions , start a lively discussion in the classroom, and then see if we could get a consensus of what the right answer was. When the answer was wrong, it provided an even better starting point for analyzing the problem and why intuition sometimes fails even scientists. Feedback from the students was that this was also a much-appreciated feature in the classroom. Professors asking questions highlighted an important cultural difference. It is already not easy to get U.S. students asking questions freely in the classroom, although methods (such as pairing) have fortunately been developed to help break the ice. It is even harder in Vietnam, where students come from an educational 19



system that emphasizes deference to the senior person, and where the stress of performance (e.g. national entrance exams) is so high that no student wants to appear ‘silly’ in front of his or her peers by asking a question. Our solution to this problem was a gradual one: the same faculty from Illinois would visit multiple times and teach the same class, emphasizing participation. By the K53 or K54 class, about 4 years into the program, it seems that the word had gotten out that the American professors don’t bite, and students gradually felt more at ease asking questions, rather than just listening and taking notes. It should be mentioned that the modern versions of classes, taught from books such as Zumdahl’s “Chemistry” for freshmen or Atkins’ “Physical Chemistry” for juniors, were in all cases complemented by labs. These labs were fully taught by faculty from HUS. For ‘Type II’ classes this was often done in the period of time before the visiting professor from the U.S. would arrive. Although some of these labs use relatively antiquated experiments (as we also still do sometimes in the U.S., such as elemental qualitative analysis by precipitation), the HUS administration has made a concerted effort to upgrade equipment. They applied for and received grants from the government to purchase modern instrumentation from NMR machines down to UV-vis spectrometers, and everything in-between. This is an effort that was solely spearheaded by the HUS/VNU administration, although we believe that the buy-in from major institutions in the U.S. (UIUC), France, and Japan gave some impetus to the instrumentation modernization program. There were also problems in implementation. On the HUS side, the department had to completely renovate a classroom to provide such amenities as a sliding white board, computer projector and screen, and (not unimportant for the U.S. faculty) air conditioning. As we found out from our side, a significant fraction of the students in class (about a third) still had an English background that made it hard to follow lectures. It became very important to speak clearly, allowing not just the science, but also the English to sink in, before proceeding. We quickly realized that less was more. Thus, presenting less material and spending more time to stop and take questions produced greater learning. Of course everyone knows that this idea can also be fruitfully applied in courses with native English speakers. Overall, the Illinois faculty taught and later co-taught every lecture course from freshman chemistry to junior-level physical and organic chemistry. The one type of class we left to the Vietnamese instructors were the laboratories. The lecture courses taught encompass a full chemistry curriculum, of the type accredited in the U.S. by the ACS. In the next few paragraphs, we discuss examples of specific courses that were taught using the different implementations. Accelerated freshman chemistry (as taught by James Lisy). The first course involving the K51 class, the equivalent of Chem 202 (Accelerated Freshman Chemistry at Illinois), was taught during summer of 2007 at the end of July and beginning of August. At the time, there was no special (i.e. air-conditioned) classroom at HUS. Environmental conditions: 35 °C and a heat index of over 40 °C, were extremely challenging. The lecture hall was quite large, easily holding the ~35 members of the K51 class, and a number of HUS faculty who were better acclimatized to the conditions. Lisy had lectured extensively in the Far East for 20



a decade prior to this first trip to Hanoi, and modified both his lecture notes and presentation. Key to this was a slow and deliberate oral presentation that allowed the HUS students and faculty to follow the lecture. The General Chemistry staff at UIUC (specifically, Don DeCoste, Patricia Phillips-Batoma, and Gretchen Adams) were extremely supportive and helpful, providing laboratory video demonstrations, and example exams. The course was conducted with three hour-long lectures each day, over a two week period. All of the normal Chem 202 topics were covered. Starting with a discussion of stoichiometry and reaction types, we quickly moved to gases and chemical equilibria. This was the first section of the course. Quantum mechanics and atomic theory, with an introduction to chemical bonding, hybridization and molecular orbital theory comprised the second half of the course. Exams were given at the end of each week, using a slightly modified format of UIUC Chem 202 exams. A larger number of multiple choice and a smaller number of "long answer" problems were given for the first exam in hopes of reducing the reading time that the K51 students would need to spend. However, this was not the case, as the students spent considerable time reading the multiple choice questions. The second exam used the standard Chem 202 format with the same number of multiple choice and long answer problems as given to UIUC students. Performances on this exam by the HUS K51 students were similar to the UIUC class, comprised of mainly Chemical Engineering and Chemistry majors. Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (as taught by Martin Gruebele). As an example of the abbreviated visit, where a HUS faculty member pre-teaches a part of the course, an Illinois chemistry professor then teaches another segment, and finally the HUS faculty concludes the course, we will use Chem 444. At Illinois, this is the junior-level class in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and kinetics. Gruebele arrived in Vietnam after HUS professor Cam Ha had already taught introductory thermodynamics to the K55 class. Gruebele taught a special one-week sequence of two lectures a day making the connection between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. The classes started with the two fundamental postulates of statistical mechanics: that Hamiltonian dynamics works for many particles, and that microstates of equal energy have equal probability. From there, we derived the laws of thermodynamics (much to the surprise of students), and basic equations of state (again, students were surprised when PV=nRT suddenly appeared on the board in a few simple steps starting with the two postulates). From there, we went on to derive the mass action law to make the connection with chemical thermodynamics. Gruebele developed a special set of lecture notes in clear English, only 10 pages long but containing all derivations, to help the Vietnamese undergraduates to get the most out of the class. After that, Cam Ha took over again and concluded the course. Techniques used during the class included live demos, students pairing up to discuss and answer questions, students coming to the board to solve a prepared homework problem for the class, and daily office hours with both professors to go over the material. Office hours between and after classes, giving students flexible access, were another innovation at HUS that is of course par for the course in the U.S. (Figure 2).

21 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Figure 2. An Illinois faculty member and member of the Cottrell Science Collaborative with a HUS undergraduate discussing chemistry during office hours. Reproduced from Reference (1). Copyright 2010 American Chemical Society. Photo courtesy of authors.

Analytical chemistry (as taught by Alexander Scheeline). Vietnamese faculty were more familiar with classical wet chemical techniques than most American faculty, but less familiar with instrumental methods. Scheeline taught “Quant” four times. For K51, he taught the entire course in two weeks, supported by assistant professor (now associate) Pham Thi Ngoc Mai and HUS alumnus, UIUC graduate student, and now assistant professor at HUS, Tu Truong. Course structure was almost entirely information push, with daily problem sets, an hour examination, and a final examination. In-class discussion improved by the second week of the course, but was still strained. Each K54 student worked an individual problem at the blackboard, Pham Mai taught most of the material with only occasional suggestions from the eastern side of the Pacific, and since has run the course independently. Instrumental analysis evolved more slowly. There still are no optical, vibrational, or mass spectroscopists on-staff at HUS. Research focuses on environmental monitoring, so chromatographic strength exceeds spectrometric skills. How can one teach instrumentation principles to students who have never used instruments? Because students had ubiquitous access to digital cameras (in later years, in their cell phones), a build-it-yourself absorbance spectrometer was used to introduce engineering and chemical/instrumental ideas. This resulted in several papers, one patent, and the founding of a U.S. company co-owned by one of the K51 students (4–8). Use of in-class, web-supported projects for some students while others worked on English language presentations on various instrumental topics allowed one-onone instruction. Scientists from the Vietnam Institute for Science and Technology provided additional instruction in separations and electrochemistry, reducing the amount of time consumed for American lectures. The mixed student lecture, Vietnamese instructor, plus American supplemental lecture format has evolved to the point that Thi Thao Ta and, more recently, Pham Tien Duc, now cover almost everything except microfluidics, vibrational spectrometry, and mass spectrometry. Each student presents a lecture for which extensive questioning in English by fellow students is expected. 22



Organic Chemistry (as taught by Steven Zimmerman). This was an abbreviated visit with Dr. Phạm Văn Phong teaching the majority of the course. The usual instructor for this course, Prof. Nguyễn Văn Đậu, a senior organic faculty member at HUS had unexpectedly broken his leg on a hike in the countryside. So the young faculty member Phong, who obtained his Ph.D. in the U.S. and carried out a postdoc with John Hartwig at the University of Illinois, filled in at the last moment. He taught the K58 advanced class from Vollhardt’s textbook and passed the baton to Zimmerman who covered the chapters on the chemistry of alkynes, conjugated systems, and arenes. The lectures featured considerable time for problem solving with mechanism and synthesis problems presented, the students working in small groups on a solution, and the instructor circulating around the classroom to offer hints and answer questions. Students would go to the board and present solutions, and the class would critique the solutions. At Illinois, Zimmerman uses multiple methods to supplement standard chalkboard lectures, including pre-lecture videos that allow for a partially flipped classroom to complete lecture notes and full video lectures posted on-line. Despite some technological challenges in transferring many GB of videos to the Hanoi server, the course materials covering the entire semester, not just the chapters covered, were made available to all of the students. The feedback was very positive with some students saying that they watched all of the video lectures and found them to be excellent learning tools. The remainder of the course was covered by Phong who administered a final exam written by Zimmerman, who also graded them in Urbana over the winter break.

Student Performance Assessment Students in the K51-current classes by and large performed extremely well. Part of this is due to careful selection of the best young chemists in Vietnam by the HUS faculty for the program, but of course this was counterbalanced by the extra challenge of studying difficult material in a recently acquired foreign language. Figure 3 shows the performance of the K52 class on a standardized freshman chemistry exam, which was also given a semester earlier to the Illinois Accelerated Freshman Chemistry Class, consisting largely of AP students (scores of 4 or 5), most of them valedictorians or salutatorians of their high school class (determined by a self-reported poll). As can be seen, the HUS students in this particular class ranked in the upper half compared to the Illinois 202 class, due to selection of top students, but in spite of the exam being in English. It is important to note that in later classes (K54 to present), HUS has made an effort to democratize student selection more, and bring in more good but not exceptionally strong students, to broaden the base of the program. Chem 442 and 444 were given by Lisy to the K51 and K52 classes. His exams were based on the UIUC courses, which he has taught for a number of years. The exam format is demanding with five questions during an hour exam: three questions based on homework content, a fourth question that combines two separate concepts, and a final question that could best be described as 23



"challenging". Student performance by the HUS students was very similar to that of UIUC students. For Chem 444, results from the K51 class were typical. The average (based on a total score of 100) was 64.4, with a standard deviation of 17.5. Among the top students in this course, four have now successfully completed PhD degrees (three at UIUC and one at UC-Berkeley). Similarly, the K51 class was given an hour exam similar to that for the equivalent Illinois class where the mean was 50 and standard deviation 17. Graded by Vietnamese faculty (but with grading spot checked by Scheeline), the mean and standard deviation matched the U.S. grades within 1 point. Comparisons for recent years are not available, as Vietnamese faculty write most of the questions (although their English is edited by American faculty, if our Vietnamese colleagues so desire). Thus we conclude that the Vietnamese students generally performed equally, and in some cases even better than, U.S. classes consisting mainly of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering majors at Illinois.

Figure 3. Performance of an Illinois (red) and Hanoi (black) accelerated chemistry class on the exact same multiple choice exam, which is not available on the internet.

Cultural Experience for Illinois Faculty We also learned a lot from our interaction with Vietnamese faculty and students. Our hosts at HUS generally assigned a faculty member (usually co-teaching the class), and a TA (often another lecturer) to help with the course, but also to serve as a cultural guide. Likewise, students participated extensively in showing visiting faculty around Hanoi and Vietnam, and engaging them in activities. Examples of activities include visiting the tomb of Ho Chi Minh, a national shrine near a beautiful garden that the Vietnamese are very proud of; sight-seeing Hanoi by walking tours or cycling with students and faculty; driving tours to locations such as Ha Long Bay, Sa Pa or Ninh Binh, hand making your own pottery in Bat Trang, the pottery village near Hanoi; and of course tasting a huge 24



variety of unusual (in the U.S.) foods from grilled goat to all the exotic fruit that Southeast Asia has to offer. It was also quite a sobering experience to visit Vietnam (especially Huế) during “Victory Day,” when liberation from U.S. and other international forces is celebrated. As Americans, we are generally not used to be on the losing side of a victory celebration. Although all of these experiences had a strong recreational component, they turned out to be a critical part in making the exchange a success. Faculty got to know one another at a personal level, visiting each other’s homes in Vietnam or in the U.S. Long discussions outside the classroom with students revealed their ambitions and worries in what is still not an open and democratic society. Talking to administrators and faculty in social settings allowed a bigger picture to emerge as to where they want to take education and research in Vietnam. This often brought together counterparts from the U.S., France or Japan, who also participated in educational outreach activities with Hanoi. In the end, all of us felt that we had become friends with our counterparts at HUS. Our senior faculty was integrated in discussions with Hanoi faculty to define the policy of the program. Some of these sessions were formal (Figure 4), while others were handled at one of many teas or business dinners (a favorite way in Vietnam to conduct work, unlike the U.S., where spending funds on food or drink is generally frowned upon by federal agencies).

Figure 4. Steve Zimmerman in Dean Luu Van Boi’s office in Hanoi in 2008 discussing implementation of the cooperative program with Boi (third from right) and his leadership team including future Rector Noi (far left). There was also a strong scientific outreach component, with faculty from Illinois presenting their research at the weekly seminar series at HUS during their visit. These seminars were well-attended by faculty, postdocs and students of HUS. Again, we found after talks that students and even faculty are quite shy about asking questions, and it took 2 to 3 years of visits to get them routinely used to the idea of asking questions, although the questions remain polite as opposed to critical. For faculty who visited in May, it was at times possible for Illinois professors to co-examine students during their bachelors thesis defense. At times, students whose English had been mediocre during classes exhibited outstanding speaking skills. In a few unfortunate cases, their English skills had atrophied after the classes had ended. Outreach to VNU faculty Interaction with Illinois has become a sine qua non for leadership at VNUS-H (Figure 5). Nguyen Van Noi has become rector, Le Than Son is now Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry, Trieu Thi Nguyet leads Inorganic 25



Chemistry, and Thi Thao Ta is head of Analytical Chemistry. All (plus 5 others) spent three months each at Illinois, attending classes, participating in research group meetings, experiencing the culture, visiting sites of regional interest, and using the chemistry library, a facility rare in the world and orders of magnitude richer than available in Vietnam. All also improved their English substantially while in residence. To encourage interaction with research groups, each was provided a desk with graduate students in a group doing research at least somewhat related to the work the visitors did at home. Some participated immediately, while others were shy. Especially among early visitors, the mandate that they attend classes to observe teaching methods translated into perfect attendance in lectures and near absentia from research group meetings. Once Illinois faculty sensed the pattern, one-on-one discussions led to better integration and more productive visits. As an example of research participation, Professor Le Long Kim visited Argonne National Lab with the Gruebele group. He, Gruebele and graduate students worked at the APS BioCAT beamline together closely for two days to study protein-protein association of SH3 and lambda repressor at Argonne. Although courses in Hanoi needed to be tuned so that students could fully relate to the material, the course outlines started as those provided by Illinois faculty. An example of an adjustment can be seen in the treatment of gas chromatography detectors. In the U.S., the standard order in textbooks is typically thermal conductivity, flame ionization, electron capture, mass spectrometry. Because of the widespread characterization of chlorinated compounds in soil secondary to the use of defoliants during the American War (1959-1975), starting with the widely used electron capture detector was more sensible. Instead of discussing atomic absorption starting with flame AA, cold vapor mercury and borohydride reduction arsenic AA were more relevant. Assigning lecture topics to students meant learning of relevant industries, environmental problems, and economic aspirations. Exams could be similar in emphasis to those in the U.S., but geographical features, specific analytes, and proper nouns all were adjusted. Joint writing of exams revealed differences in emphasis. Whereas the Vietnamese faculty wrote questions that heavily focused on knowing method details, their American counterparts asked for application of basic principles. Vietnamese faculty were used to having all exams approved by their co-workers before administration, while Americans were astonished that anyone but the course instructor would see questions in advance. Perhaps one reason for slow curriculum change prior to 2007 was this exam writing and critiquing by committee. By 2010, exams were frequently written and graded only by the U.S. and Vietnamese co-instructors of each course. In the opposite direction, U.S. faculty assigned the first student lectures with minor input from their Vietnamese counterparts. By 2016, 90% of the topics were assigned by Vietnamese faculty, the U.S. faculty member edited the topics for scope and language, and the courtesy 10% of topics left for the U.S. faculty member to assign were as much to maintain U.S. involvement as to provide engaging topics.



Figure 5. Vietnamese and American faculty in Champaign, May 1, 2008. Seated: Triệu Thị Nguyệt, Nguyễn Văn Đậu, and Phạm Thị Ngọc Mai. Standing: Anne Barranger, Martin Gruebele, James Lisy, Patricia Shapley, and Alexander Scheeline. Reproduced from Reference (1). Copyright 2010 American Chemical Society. Photo courtesy of authors.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities The initial components implemented in our program, modernizing chemistry courses at HUS and bringing HUS faculty to Illinois to visit classrooms and adopt materials, were followed up with additional components to enable HUS undergraduate students to engage in research, and eventually apply successfully to U.S. and international institutions such as Stanford, Illinois, or University of Tokyo. Summer undergraduate research was phased in during the third year of the program, when the K51 (first) class of Hanoi students had taken sufficiently many classes and labs to be prepared for research, just like their counterparts in the U.S.

Figure 6. Duc Nguyen from HUS-VNU with Illinois student Krish Sarkar, doing research on RNA folding that led to a co-authored publication. Photo by Martin Gruebele. 27 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Typically every year 2 to 11 students are selected from the current junior class. The primary selection criteria are performance in their courses at HUS, and English proficiency. The latter is judged by faculty from the U.S. We had multiple opportunities to get to know students at length in Vietnam, and most students were well-known to several Illinois faculty members. Out of a set of students proposed by HUS, Illinois faculty made a final selection of those most likely to succeed based on both chemistry and communications skills. To facilitate the transition to the U.S., the program has in the past also included additional language instruction for students during their 2 to 3 month summer visit. In addition, outreach activities included trips to Chicago or the Lincoln House and Grave sites in Springfield IL, led by Illinois students who were assigned as mentors. In all cases, students are paired with a graduate student mentor at Illinois, who directly supervised their projects in addition to general faculty supervision. Projects range widely, because faculty from many areas of Illinois chemistry participate in the program. One project on surface adsorption on silica was a collaboration between the WATER CAMPwS consortium, the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, and the Department of Chemistry involving a masters student from Bangladesh, a K53 student from Hanoi, and a U.S. undergraduate. Each brought different strengths to the project, which was largely completed in 1.5 months. Luu Minh Long and Lien Nguyen, two students from the K51 class at HUS first came to UIUC as summer students, ultimately becoming key members of a remarkably productive team working on a drug discovery project directed toward myotonic dystrophy type 1 and 2. Beyond publishing multiple papers during their Ph.D. studies, they became heavily involved in outreach related to their research. Thus, both regularly attended Muscular Dystrophy Association meetings and fundraising events, discussing their research with patients and their families as well as other researchers. Somtimes, a Vietnamese student was even able to visit for two separate summer research experiences. Figure 6 shows Duc Nguyen in the lab with former Illinois PhD student Krish Sarkar, working on a project to measure fast laser-induced RNA folding. Their work resulted in a co-authored publication. During a second visit, Duc worked on a completely different project with then-graduate student Sumit Ashtekar, measuring dynamics on glass surfaces by scanning tunneling microscopy. That collaboration also resulted in co-authored publications. In most cases, we limited the program to one summer research experience per student, to enable as many as possible to visit Illinois during the summer. Similar exchanges with France, Japan and other countries also organized by HUS led to about a quarter of each class (8-12 students) getting some research experience at the international level, a significant impact on the HUS chemistry student population. Students from Vietnam also got to meet other undergraduate researchers, for example through our Chemistry REU program. This enriched their experience further, through joint poster sessions with U.S. REU students to showcase their research at the end of the visit. All students were asked to provide a written report 28



about their science, to be evaluated by the U.S. professor. In addition, all students were asked to give a short talk about their research experience. The cost of the program was facilitated by a combination of funds from HUS, from the Chemistry Department at Illinois, and from faculty who had summer undergraduate research funds available for a student stipend. The previously described evolution of a spectrometry experiment into a cottage industry led to Bui Anh Thu performing Masters research on her concurrently patented instrument at VNUS-H. The fortuitous timing of a trip to teach Instrumental Methods in the spring of 2016 led to Ms. Thu receiving her Masters at the hands of both VNUS-H and her company co-owner, co-inventor, and summer research adviser from 2010 (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Bui Anh Thu receiving her Masters degree from Rector Nguyen Van Noi by way of Alexander Scheeline in Hanoi. Photo by Pham Tien Duc.

Graduate Studies in the U.S. Following a successful undergraduate research experience, Illinois agreed to review applications for graduate school from HUS students, as we would for any other international student. No special exceptions were made at this stage as far as passing English proficiency test requirements, GPA performance, or letters of recommendation and research experience. Naturally, the HUS students who applied having gone through the entire HUS-Illinois program often were at an advantage. A good fraction of them had sufficient English skills to pass language exams, or came close enough that we made an exception (subject to ESL training at Illinois and later passage of exams), as we also do for other foreign students. They had letters of recommendation from our faculty based on knowing them personally from Vietnam or from their undergraduate summer research, which helped enormously both for us to judge the quality of the student, and for the student to make a choice as to which university to attend because a large fraction of them were also admitted to peer institutions such as Stanford or Wisconsin. 29



Duc Nguyen (Figure 6) is an example of a success story. After two summers at Illinois, he successfully applied to the graduate program in chemistry, and joined the group of one of us (Gruebele) as a PhD student. He immediately started getting results and publishing papers, and is now writing up his 9th and last UIUC publication, on excited state tomography of quantum dots, after receiving his PhD from Illinois in 2016. Duc has offers for postdoctoral positions, and is interested in an academic career. He mentored two U.S. undergraduate students during his stay at Illinois, and has presented his work at many conferences, becoming a fully integrated member of the scientific culture. During this time, he also got married and had a child, showing that success in science does not have to come at the expense of family. He is an outstanding role model for other PhD students in the department, and won both departmental and Beckman graduate fellowships. The program has had many other success stories. For example, Thanh Phuong Dao from the K51 class went to work for Alex Pines at UC Berkeley. Other examples include LSU: Nguyen Huu Huy and Nguyen Hoai Thu; Arizona State: Nguyen Duc Trung; UMass: Pham Gia Bach; Alberta: Nguyen Thuong Thuy; UI Chicago: Pham Thi Ha; University of Iowa: Phan Tri Hoa. Thus, students end up at universities all over the U.S. and Canada, not just at Illinois. Although only 8 years old, in one case the program has closed full circle: Tu Truong received his Ph.D. working with John Rogers at Illinois, and is now on-staff as a 3rd year assistant professor in Hanoi. Thus freshmen once trained by the program are now beginning to trickle back to VNU, ready to teach in English as well as in Vietnamese, and trained using modern curricula, classroom teaching approaches, and materials. The program has now been operating for 9 years, such that freshmen from the K51 or K52 class, who graduated in 2011/2012, are now finishing up their graduate education in the U.S. or abroad elsewhere. This is a critical juncture where they will make decision about whether to return to Vietnam to teach, take on a different career in Vietnam or internationally, or remain in the U.S. for their career choice.

What the Future Holds The Vietnamese government has reviewed the VNU/HUS-Illinois cooperative program extremely favorably with continued funding allotted this past academic year (2015). Indeed, the program received the highest score of those reviewed. The program was also reviewed by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 2012. It received the second highest chemistry rating (Singapore was ranked highest), largely because of collaboration with universities in Japan, Korea, and Illinois. Moving forward there will be several important challenges. Once the U.S. curriculum was fully operational, it would then be migrated to all the relevant departments within the VNU system. Of course, that process will occur largely through efforts on the Vietnamese side, but we are prepared to offer assistance as necessary. Success in this migration means the Illinois chemistry curriculum would be taught throughout Vietnam, significantly increasing the impact of the 30



educational program. We already have on campus students from Ho Chi Minh City with connections to South Vietnam, who are interested in participating. The original goal of the Vietnamese government was to have a similar cooperative program for each major subject area, pairing a U.S. university and a school within the VNU system. So far, the approach has not been extended to other subjects such as physics, but we hope that more departments and U.S. universities will get engaged in the future. Another challenge relates the propensity for older faculty at HUS to continue to teach their courses as they have for years. This desire is entirely natural and handled by pairing a younger faculty member as TA and older faculty member who work together. As more U.S.-trained instructors return home in the footsteps of Tu Truong over the course of the next several years, the change in delivery will accelerate. These same students bring a desire for a more globally competitive research environment. As the research enterprise is further built up opportunities for research collaborations will emerge, closing yet another loop that connects our two departments. The program has also proven beneficial for the Illinois faculty, as a means of cultural exchange, broadening their teaching base, and building new scientific collaborations. Our young colleagues, such as Prashant Jain in physical chemistry, are now taking over and bringing their unique view and curricula to Vietnam. The Chemistry Department of HUS-VNU, founded in 1956, has just celebrated its 60th anniversary on November 19th, 2016. As one of us remarked in his address to the faculty (Figure 8), we look forward to future work together, building ties between the two countries through higher education in chemistry.

Figure 8. Alexander Scheeline addressing the VNU faculty and alumni at the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the chemistry department in Hanoi.


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Arnaud, C. East-West Partnership. Chem. Eng. News. 2010, 88, 58–59. Harvey, D. Analytical Chemistry 2.0: An Electronic Textbook for Introductory Courses in Analytical Chemistry; Greencastle, IN, 2009. Harris, D. C. Quantitative Chemical Analysis; W. H. Freeman: New York, 2007. Scheeline, A; Kelley, K. J. Analyt. Sci. Digital Libr. Cell Phone Spectrometer; entry 10059, 2009. Reprinted in m-Science: Sensing, Computing, and Dissemination; Cannesa, E., Zennaro, M., Eds.; The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, November, 2010. Scheeline, A. Teaching in Hanoi: Good Mornings in Vietnam. Anal. Bioanal. Chem. 2010, 398, 2751–2753. Scheeline, A. Focal Point: Teaching, Learning, and Using Spectroscopy with Commercial, Off-the-Shelf Technology. Appl. Spectrosc. 2010, 64, 256A–268A. Scheeline, A.; Thự, B. A. Stacked, Mutually Rotated Diffraction Gratings as Enablers of Portable Visible Spectrometry. Appl. Spectrosc. 2016, 70, 766–777. Bui, T. A.; Scheeline, A. Energy Dispersion Device. Patent Application 13/596,242, 20130093936 A1, filed 8/28/2012, published 4/18/2013, issued 8,885,161 B2, 11/11/2014.


Building a Modern Chemistry Undergraduate Program at Hanoi

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