Dr. Thai-Ha Le is the Managing Director of the VinFuture Prize, VinFuture Foundation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and Ph.D. in Economics from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where she completed her Ph.D. within two years at the age of 24. Prior to joining VinFuture Foundation, Dr. Le was the Director of Research and a Senior Faculty member at Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management, Fulbright University Vietnam for nearly three years and was a tenured Senior Lecturer at RMIT University Vietnam for seven years. Her primary research fields include energy economics, environmental economics, and applied economics.
Dr. Le is an active researcher who has published over 60 scholarly research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals such as Energy Economics, Energy Journal, Energy Policy, Renewable Energy, Resources Policy, Economic Modelling, International Review of Financial Analysis, Empirical Economics, Annals of Operations Research, Applied Economics, and Australian Tax Forum.
According to rankings compiled by Stanford University and published in PLoS Biology in 2021, Dr. Le is in the world’s top 1% most influential scientists across all scientific fields, and is the only Vietnamese female researcher based in Vietnam in this ranking. She is also the youngest (and the only female) member of the scientific committee in economics for the term 2022-2024 of the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) (affiliated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology).
Dr. Le has consulted for the World Bank, UNDP, Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA). She is a recipient of multiple competitive research grants and fellowships such as the Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) Fellowship for Young Scholars in 2013; the Public Diplomacy Federal Assistance Award by The U.S. Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City; Vietnam’s Public Affairs Section in 2018; and the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) funds for research in social sciences and humanities in 2019 as the principal investigator.
Dr. Le was an external reviewer for the Vici Social Sciences and Humanities programme under the NWO Talent Programme, the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy and holds associate editor/editorial roles with several other scholarly journals including the Journal of Economic Asymmetries (Elsevier); Journal of Economic Development (sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea); Singapore Economic Review (one of the oldest and most respected economics journals in the Asia-Pacific region); and “Springer New Monograph Series, New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives” (Springer Nature).
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