More than 300 faculty, researchers, students, and staff gathered on June 6, 2026, for VinUni’s first-ever university-wide research showcase: a day designed not just to display what VinUni researchers do, but to bring all into conversation with one another what the university was built to serve.
With up to 80 research projects on display, 30 live demonstrations, and a full afternoon of student-led workshops, VinUni Research Day & Bootcamp 2026 marked a new chapter in the university’s research story, one shaped by a single, deliberate word at the heart of its design: Connect.
In this post:
From Vision to Urgency: Session 1 – Research Briefing
The morning opened with welcome remarks from President Lê Mai Lan and keynote address by Dr. Cấn Văn Lực, Chief Economist of BIDV and Member of the National Financial and Monetary Policy Advisory Council, one of Vietnam’s most respected voices on economic policy. Dr. Lực analysis of Vietnam’s economic trajectory, global financial headwinds, and the structural shifts reshaping the region did more than brief an academic audience: it located VinUni’s research priorities squarely within the country’s most urgent national needs. Closing the session, Vice Provost for Research and Innovation (VPRI) Professor Laurent El Ghaoui drew a through-line between the keynote’s macro lens and the work unfolding across VinUni’s research clusters and 3P strategy. Research does not happen in a vacuum. The questions VinUni chooses to pursue, in health, technology, sustainability, economics, and social equity, carry weight beyond the lab and the lecture hall.
More on the briefing session can be found HERE.
Research in Motion: Session 2 – Research Fair
By 11AM, the event had transformed into a vibrant research ecosystem, showcasing collaboration, innovation, and knowledge exchange.
Representatives from VinUni’s thematic research clusters took the floor first, offering a panoramic view of the university’s intellectual landscape: the key themes driving each cluster, the projects gaining traction, and, crucially, the open questions and opportunities that no single team could pursue alone.
What followed was three hours of the kind of conversation that rarely happens by accident. Researchers moved between poster displays and video installations, pausing at demonstrations, asking questions, discovering unexpected overlaps with colleagues they had never had reason to meet. More than 80 projects were on show; 30 offered hands-on demonstrations. The room was, in the most productive sense, loud.
The Research Fair was designed from the ground up to do what formal structures rarely permit: lower the friction between disciplines, surfaces, and research cultures. Every design choice, from the event’s visual identity to the language on its five backdrop panels, was oriented toward one outcome: connections for science, science for humanity. The key visual centered on that word deliberately. Not networking as a social nicety, but connection as a research strategy.
Research at VinUni was presented not as static display but as conversations and activities: interactive posters invited attendees to engage directly with the work, reflection boards captured responses and ideas from across the community, and a range of student-organized activities made the research accessible to anyone curious enough to stop and ask.
Running concurrently, the VinUni Student Research Club (VRC) organized lab tours that drew more than 80 participants into three of the university’s research facilities: the Digital Material Science Lab, the Energy and Environmental Sustainability lab, the Anatomy Lab, and the Biology Lab. For many attendees, the tours offered something the poster displays could not: research encountered not through a screen or a summary, but in the spaces where it actually happens.
Research by the Next Generation: Session 3 – Research Bootcamp
The afternoon belonged to students.
From 2 to 6PM, the student-led Research Bootcamp, organized by the VinUni Student Research Club (VRC), took place with engaging research activities and knowledge-sharing sessions. Workshop sessions ran in parallel with oral presentations, offering a platform for early-career researchers to share work, receive feedback, and step into the identity of a researcher, not as a credential to pursue, but as a practice already underway.
The Bootcamp is a reminder that VinUni’s research culture is not inherited from the top down. It is being built, simultaneously, by the faculty who ask the questions and the students who learn to ask them too.
A Flagship in the Making
VinUni Research Day & Bootcamp 2026 marked the first event of its kind at the university, laying the foundation for a continued journey of research excellence and innovation.
The day demonstrated what becomes possible when researchers are given the conditions: the space, the time, the structured serendipity to encounter each other’s work. Ideas were exchanged. Collaborations were seeded. Some conversations that began in the Grand Hall will produce joint proposals, interdisciplinary projects, and research that none of the participants could have conceived of alone.
That is the point. And it is the reason this event, conceived as a catalyst for VinUni’s research community, is now established as a flagship activity for the Research Management Office, and for the university as a whole.
After this day, we hope each participant has found out what connects us: Science for Humanity. Born in Vietnam. Built for the world.
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VinUni Research Day & Bootcamp 2026 was organized by
the VinUni Research Management Office (RMO) and VinUni Student Research Club (VRC).