Khanh D. Pham
Dr. Pham was born in Saigon, Vietnam, to a historian (Pham Van Son) and country poet (Bang Ba Lan) family. His parents served in the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government during the Vietnam War and became prisoners of war from 1975 to 1982. Under the Special Release Re-education Center Detainee Resettlement Program (a.k.a. Humanitarian Operation), he and his family and came to the U.S. in the early 1990s. At the time, he was a second-year college student in electrical engineering of at Ho Chi Minh University of Technology and Education in Vietnam, who barely spoke English. Dr. Pham worked hard to learn his new country’s language and though an older student, attended high school at Lincoln High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, graduating three years after arriving in the U.S. While in high school, he worked as a custodian for two hours before school started and in the evenings, he attended the Southeast Community College where he earned a degree of Associate of Applied Science with highest honors in electronic systems technology.