At the age of 20, Molena received multiple offers of admission and fully funded graduate assistantships from prestigious Ph.D. programs in both Pure and Applied Mathematics. After thoughtful deliberation, she was honored to embark on her doctoral journey at the age of 21 as an incoming first-year Ph.D. student in (Pure) Mathematics at North Carolina State University—a decision she fondly refers to as the beginning of her most treasured and remarkable _.phdjourneyat21._
Molena’s distinguished _.phdjourneyat21._ was deeply rooted in her early academic path. At age 15, she began as a secondary school student specializing in English at Tran Dai Nghia High School for the Gifted. Later, she transitioned to focus on Vietnamese Literature at VNU-HCM High School for the Gifted, one of Vietnam’s top-tier institutions. By 17, she had earned acceptance and full-ride scholarships to several U.S. undergraduate programs in English and English Literature.
At age 18, Molena received her final academic award in Vietnamese Literature in Ho Chi Minh City before relocating to the United States. Just two years later, at 20, she was admitted to multiple doctoral programs in mathematics and further prepared herself by attending the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics in Spring 2021.
By 23, Molena had completed her second year in the Applied Mathematics Ph.D. program, passed all required qualifying exams, and earned a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics with a GPA of 4.1665 out of 4.0000—one of the most memorable milestones in her graduate journey.
At the age of 25, she proudly completed her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, becoming a Ph.D. holder and solidifying her place in the mathematical community—a testament to her unwavering dedication, intellectual passion, and the journey that began with a bold decision at 20.
▪️ How to reach Molena: 
▪️ Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
▪️ Earlier, I was fortunate to receive the opportunities to present my single-author paper titled “Take-Away Impartial Combinatorial Games on Hypergraphs and Other Related Geometric and Discrete Structures” (DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2203.09696) at six different SIAM conferences. During the Spring semester of 2022, I presented that research at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP22), the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ22), and the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM22). During the Fall semester of 2021, I presented that research at the Young Mathematicians Conference (YMC21), the SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section Annual Meeting (SEAS21), and the Annual SIAM Central States Section Conference (CSS21).
▪️ Subsequently, I received two National Science Foundation Funded Ph.D. Research Internships to work in two different lab rotations. During these internships, I learned how to utilize the High Performance Computing clusters, and the GPUs to solve problems in different fields, from Computational Biology, to Computer Science, Electrical, and Computer Engineering.
▪️ Lastly, I have been a representative for the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM) at the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Student Chapter since September 2022. In January of 2022, I was a project mentor at the "Tenth Annual Conference to Increase Diversity in Mathematical Modeling and Public Health" (2022 MIDAS-CCDD), which was hosted by the MIDAS Coordination Center in cooperation with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. In October of 2021, I was a conference moderator at the Graduates Achieving Inclusion Now (GAIN) Conference on measuring graduate students' success, allyship, and mentorship.