Vietnamese Student Clinches Two Physics Awards at MIT

Vietnamese student Tran Quang Vinh has been honored with two major physics awards at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), consistently ranked as the world's No. 1 university for 15 consecutive years. Vinh received the Morse/Orloff Research Award, a $1,000 prize for a physics senior of high academic standing who plans to pursue graduate study. The award is named after Philip Morse, an MIT physics professor and a leading physicist of the 20th century, and Joel Matthew Orloff, a former physics major. Additionally, Vinh was presented with the Barrett Prize, a $1,000 award for a senior undergraduate or graduate student in astrophysics. This prize honors the late Professor Alan Barrett's significant influence on physics education and his contributions to astrophysics. Having studied in the physics specialist class at Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, Vinh was one of three Vietnamese students to win gold at the International Physics Olympiad in 2021. The five-member national team also secured two silvers, finishing seventh overall. He had previously secured a silver medal at the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics. Upon entering MIT in 2022, Vinh has also made significant research contributions. He is the lead author of "Gravothermal catastrophe in resonant self-interacting dark matter models," published in Physical Review D in August 2024, and "Novel density profile for isothermal cores of dark matter halos," in the same journal in March 2025. In 2025, he also earned an MIT Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Now pursuing his doctorate in physics at the California Institute of Technology, Vinh's research interests include large-scale structure, dark matter, computational astrophysics, and machine learning.