Van Quynh Thi Truong
Van Quynh Thi Truong
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Introduction
Introduction
Hi, I'm Van Quynh! I was born in a rural village on the central coast of Vietnam and spent most of my life in Florida. Before I became a scientist, I was first a self-taught artist from a very young age. As a scientist, I am deeply interested in the technical, sociocultural, business, and policy implications of global trends in AI's impact on scientific research, novel applications, and emerging ecosystems. Additionally, I'm keen on tracking multinational computing infrastructure and tech policy. As an artist, I'm absolutely obsessed with how AI's presence is changing the way we think, interact, and create with one another. I have over a decade of experience across academic, government, and private sectors.
While I am primarily a computational scientist, I love to wear other hats in art, anthropology, bio/tech ecosystem leadership roles, community involvement, and doing fun hobby side quests. Additionally, I am committed to the mentorship and empowerment of underrepresented students.
My fun fact is at age 19, I biked solo across the country to fundraise for the Alexander Hamilton Scholars Program, a cause close to my heart. I continue to closely mentor high school, college, post-bac, and graduate students.
JUST FOR FUN
JUST FOR FUN
My interests outside of work include mountain biking, surfing, rock climbing, camping, foraging wild plants, designing interactive art sculptures, and playing on the Wharton "Wildebeests" rugby team. I previously played on Penn Women's "Venus" ultimate frisbee team and we went to the 2021 USA Ultimate National College Championships ('Natties'). I even got to rally & play in a couple games at Natties despite sustaining a shoulder injury when a car hit me while biking.
Within my community, I serve as the Executive Director of Village Bridges, a Vietnamese heritage organization I co-founded with a team of young women from my village to record the history of our diaspora community.
Living in Philly has been fun. Here's some things I've put together:
NEWS
NEWS
2026
January - Finishing up final tasks to publish my remaining thesis projects.
2025
Late December - Presented our LLM tool-calling benchmark results research at the IEEE BIBM International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine in Wuhan, China.
Supported by GAPSA PGLA and Penn's Biomedical Graduate Studies Travel Funds.
Mid-December - Invited to join the 2026 Organizing Committee for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).
Early December - Successfully defended my PhD dissertation titled, "Artificial Intelligence Strategies for Advancing Bioinformatics Infrastructure and Ecosystem" at the University of Pennsylvania.
Early November - Awarded the President Gutmann Leadership Award by the Penn Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.
Late October - Invited to submit to a special issue of Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) Journal.
Early October - Gave a session talk, "ToolsyBio: LLM Retrieval for Conversational Bioinformatics Tool Discovery," at the US Research Software Engineering (USRSE) Association's annual conference in Philadelphia, PA.
Supported by the Ritchie Lab.
August - Invited to submit to the Special 25th Anniversary Collection in the Briefings in Bioinformatics Journal.
June - My paper "ToolsyBio: A retrieval-augmented generation system for navigating the bioinformatics software landscape" was accepted for a talk and the Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference of the US Research Software Engineer Association (USRSE'25), Philadelphia, PA.
May to November - Invited to join the Women in HPC (WHPC) Workshop Organizing Committee.
March to May - Invited to join the 2025 Review Committee for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).
Late January - Our hackathon team won 1st place for our AI agent project at the Immune Health Hackathon.
Early January - Completed all requirements and submitted my MA thesis titled, "A Statistical Exploration of Large Language Models: Evolution, Challenges, and Global Concerns" to the Wharton Department of Statistics and Data Science.
2024
December - Exhibited my painterly relief textile sculpture titled "Dear A.I., Please Help Me Fill In My Village Memories" at the Resource Exchange's ReCreate Gallery from Dec 9, 2024 to Feb 26, 2025.
August to October - Lived in Vietnam for 3-months setting up a cross-cultural qualitative study to learn about Vietnam's AI, bioinformatics, and the digital infrastructure.
August - Presented interim results with my team at the AI for Health Equity Symposium AIM-AHEAD Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA.
Mid-May - Awarded the inaugural Penn Global Dissertation Grant by the the Offices of the Vice Provosts for Global Initiatives and Education.
Early May - After a competitive selection process among 500 art pieces and 130 artists, my AI art piece was among the chosen for the yearlong "2024-2025 Celebration of Art and Life Exhibition" at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine.
Unfortunately due to cost constraints with framing the art piece, I was forced to withdraw my artwork from the exhibition.
April - Exhibited my AI art piece in the final exhibition for the "AI in Art" course at the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman Hall Lobby.
February - Began the Traineeship in Advanced Data Analysis hosted by the NIH AIM AHEAD and NCATS Programs for underrepresented AI/ML researchers.
January - My application to the Fulbright-National Geographic Award Program advanced to Semi-Finalist status.
2023
December - Presented my research at the NeurIPS AI4Science Workshop.
November - Accepted the ACM SIGHPC Award onstage at SC23 in Denver, CO which drew over 13,000 attendees in the computing field.
September - Selected for the Perry World House Global Affairs Graduate Associates Program!
August - Awarded the inaugural Graduate Leadership and Engagement Award at the Penn Genomics & Computational Biology (GCB) Graduate Group and Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) Annual Retreat in the Poconos, PA.
August - Invited to join the organizing team for the 2024 London Geometry and Machine Learning Summer School (LOGML).
July - 1 of 6 awarded the 2023 ACM SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship globally!
June - Invited to join the organizing team for the 2023 Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) Symposium.
June - Started an internship at Eli Lilly & Company at the Lilly Biotechnology Center in San Diego, CA.
May - Invited to attend the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Learning Health Systems (SAIL).
Travel supported by the Ritchie Lab and Penn's Biomedical Graduate Studies Career Development Fund.
February - Attended the 6-Day Stillpond Computational Cytometry Data Analysis Workshop.
2022
November - My 1st first-author publication is in press.
1st Author, "Quality Control Procedures for Genome-Wide Association Studies."
October - 1 of 36 awarded the 2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship globally!
September - Submitted our chapter for review in the Current Protocols for Human Genetics Journal.
August - Awarded the Excedr Travel Grant to attend the inaugural Nucleate Summit in Boston, MA.
August - Abstract accepted at the American Society for Human Genetics Conference in Los Angeles, CA.
July - Attended the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCiS) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA.
Systems Immunology Course.
Big Data in Immunology Course.
June - Became a dual-degree PhD/MA Candidate with Penn Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of Business.
May - Successfully passed the Genomics & Computational Biology PhD Candidacy Exams!
April - Invited Speaker at the 2022 Catalyzing Change: Curriculum to Career, Building a Diverse and Equitable STEM Talent Pipeline.
January - Abstract accepted at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing in Kona, Hawai'i.
2021
June - Awarded the Galaxy Conference Fellowship in honor of Dr. James Taylor to support trainees in genomics and data-intensive science to reduce barriers for learning and collaboration by the Galaxy Genomics Community Fund.
March - Published our editorial in BioData Mining Journal!
2nd Author, "Ten Important Roles for Academic Leaders to Promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Data Science." https://doi.org/10.1186/s13040-021-00256-9
2020
August - Inducted into the Fontaine Society with PhD training support from the Fontaine PhD Fellowship, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania to support the academic development of PhD students from underrepresented backgrounds.
Late May - Graduated from Johns Hopkins with my MS in Biotechnology with two concentrations in Bioinformatics and Molecular Targets & Drug Discovery.
Mid-May - Published a paper in Nature Communications!
2nd Author, "Dissociable Neural Correlates of Uncertainty Underlie Different Exploration Strategies." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15766-z
FEATURED PRESS
FEATURED PRESS
ACM Special Interest Group on High-Performance Computing Press Release, “2023 ACM SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship Winners”
Penn Graduate Student Center Newsletter, Three PhD Students from Penn Selected as 2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellows, https://gsc.upenn.edu/2022-microsoft-research-phd-fellows
Women In Bio Press Release, “WIB Awards Founders Scholarship to Six Women in the Life Sciences”
The Huffington Post, "One Florida Student Turned Studying Into Art"
USA Today, "Art meets science: Florida student's creation catching campus' eye"
The Gainesville Sun, "UF students' community projects gain financial support"
Lake Alice Magazine by the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts & Sciences featured a profile on my relentless drive and perseverance as a first-generation college student from an immigrant background
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & CONTINUING EDUCATION
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & CONTINUING EDUCATION
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