Two academics from Vietnam have recently been honored for their contributions in scholarly publications to further trans-national research.

On December 8, the STAR Scholars Network announced in a video stream the honorees of the A. Noam Chomsky Global Connections Awards, a new ceremony that the network established for the first time this year. According to STAR, each year they will give out the honor to five outstanding academics in three categories.

In the awards’ first installment, two Vietnamese scientists — Dr. Trần Xuân Bách and Dr. Trần Thị Lý — were given the Shining Star Achievement in Research Award, which celebrates two individuals with “influential scholarly contributions in any discipline, whether they be in the form of scholarly journal articles, books, book chapters, or other expressions of scholarly collaboration.”

Dr. Trần Thị Lý currently works as a professor at Australia’s Deakin University in its School of Education. She’s also an Australian Research Council Future fellow. She was born in Quang Tri Province and was once a lecturer at Hue University. Lý is the author of numerous scholarly publications, including papers on student mobility and the internationalization of education. Last year, she was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of the top 50 most influential Vietnamese women.

Dr. Trần Xuân Bách is the Vice Head of Hanoi Medical University’s Department of Health Economics and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. He got his PhD and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Health Economics and Polity from the University of Alberta, Canada. Bách’s academic interests lie in the application of epidemiological-economic models to explore the determinants of infectious disease outbreaks, assess nations’ vulnerability, and identify cost-effective systems and human behavioral responses. His works have been published in The Lancet, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, AIDS and Behaviors, etc.

According to its website, the Society of Transnational Academic Researchers (STAR Scholars Network) is “an international forum of scholars that advances global social mobility by using research and advocacy.” The organization was founded to foster more global connections between world academics, conduct research and release publications focused on international education, exchange programs, academic mobility, and employability.