I was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam and did my undergraduate studies at Yale University, where I earned a Bachelor of Science in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. For my senior thesis, I studied the relationship between tree biodiversity and ecosystem function in a tropical forest in Sri Lanka. For my Ph.D., I’m interested in working in the dry forests of Central Vietnam, a region with a diversity of vegetation types. There, I want to study what factors determine the transition between savannas, dry forests, and moist forests, as well as how the forests respond to natural and anthropogenic disturbances in the context of global change.