The former president of Hanoi University of Science and Technology has become deputy minister for education and training.

Associate Professor Hoang Minh Son, who has 20 years of experience at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, has been selected as deputy minister of education and training, according to a decision by the Prime Minister effective on October 2.

As the president of Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) during 2015-2020, Associate Professor Hoang Minh Son, 51, successfully led HUST to a higher ranking in the world. It managed to get into the group of 801-1,000 best universities by the Times Higher Education 2020 Rankings. The rankings list is the only global performance table to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core functions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

Under his strong leadership, HUST started to transform from a government-funded institution of higher education to a public university with increased autonomy in academic matters, resource management and governance, staff recruitment and income-generation activities.

Since 2016 HUST has adopted a new structure of governance which on the one hand reduces the number of vice presidents, on the other, includes fledgling but independent Managerial Council. After the reform, three vice presidents, instead of five, help bolster the leadership of the president by sharing responsibility for educational affairs, student life, campus services and stewardship, international cooperation, research and technology, and public relations and communications. Meanwhile the Managerial Council with 30% of its members appointed from outside is in charge of supervising and assessing the overall direction and strategy of the university.

Associate Professor Hoang Minh Son also advocated a radical organization reform to advance HUST into a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary university so it would retain its leading role in the country and develop into a top-ranked research university in the fields of science and technology in the Southeast Asia.

With clear vision on the disruptive impact of technology on higher education, he propelled the digital transformation at the university. He said at an internal training session that placing learning materials onto online platforms is digitalization, not digital transformation. He advised the university use cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and internet of things to redefine learning experience for its students, overcoming limitations of the traditional education model.

As a forward-thinking educator, he has particularly devoted his effort to the development of Vietnamese higher education sector. He is a co-author of several papers on innovative ways to steer the higher education system more effectively as well as research on different types of reforms on the governance and management of higher education institutions.

Associate Professor Hoang Minh Son completed his PhD in automation engineering at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology in 1998. He started his career at HUST as a tenured lecturer in electrical engineering and later got promoted to associate professor.

He spent much of his time on the HUST faculty holding leadership posts. He first oversaw the university’s undergraduate programs then became vice president for research, postgraduate education, international cooperation and public relations and communications. He was named as HUST’s 12^th president in 2015. Prior to his appointment as deputy education minister, Associate Professor Hoang Minh Son was the chairman of the university’s Managerial Council following his five-year presidency.  

Over the course of two decades in the field of education, the newly-selected deputy minister was conferred with Vietnamese Prime Minister’s Certificate of Merit in 2009 and Labour Order, Third Class in 2017. He also received certificates of merit from the Education Ministry in 2006 and 2018.

Hanh Pham