Dr. Lan T. Ho-Pham is Head of Department of Rheumatology at the People’s Hospital 115, Head of Division of Bone and Muscle Research, Ton Duc Thang University and Deputy Chair of Department of Internal Medicine, Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine, Ho Chi Minh City.

She is interested in cancer and bone health research. She has conducted a number of large scale studies in cancer, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, genetics, vitamin D, and obesity.

Her work has contributed to the understanding of epidemiology of cancer, prevalence of osteoarthritis, asymptomatic vertebral fracture, osteoporosis, effect of veganism on bone health, prevalence of vitamin D and effect of vitamin D insufficiency on tuberculosis, the relationship between sex hormones and bone health in men, the association between genetic and osteoporosis, and fat mass distribution in Asians.

Her work has been published in Vietnamese journals as well as leading international medical journals such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, BMC Cancer, BMJ Open, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Bone, Osteoporosis International, Plos One, Calcified Tissue International, BMC Musculoskeletal Diseases, Obesity Research, etc.

In addition, she is an expert reviewer for the Scientific Reports, BMJ Open, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Osteoporosis International, Plos One and BMC Musculoskeletal Diseases journal.

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Dr Tuan V Nguyen AM is a National Health and Medical Research Council Leadership Fellow (previously known as Australia Fellow) and Distinguished Professor of Predictive Medicine at the School of Biomedical Engineering, and Director of the Centre for Health Technologies (from 2021). He also holds joint appointment Adjunct Professor, School of Population Health, UNSW Medicine, UNSW Sydney; and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, University of Notre Dame, Australia. He holds two doctorates in medicine and science (D.Sc., PhD). He is an elected Fellow of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. In 2022 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his significant contributions to medical research, osteoporosis prevention, and higher education. His research group (nguyenvantuan.info/nguyens-research-group) consists of clinicians, postdoc fellows and PhD students in both Australia and Vietnam.

Research interests

The primary focus of his research is on the discovery and translation of genetic and etiologic factors that determine an individual risk of fracture. He pursues both genetic and epidemiological research, often combining the two, to address issues that are transformational, shaping policy and practice leading to better treatment and control of osteoporosis. He has been pioneering in the development of predictive models for assessing fracture risk and better disease management. One of his achievements is the translation of 20-year research into a prognostic tool called " Garvan Fracture Risk Calculator" for assessing fracture risk for an individual. This model was developed based on the concept of individualized assessment which he had advanced previously. The model has been implemented in mobile devices and a dedicated website (www.fractureriskcalculator.com) which has been used by doctors and patients from all over the world.

Research collaboration

Dr Nguyen has an on-going research collaboration with Saigonmec since 2005. He has conducted many workshops in osteoporosis, evidence based medicine, research methodology, scientific writing, epidemiology and biostatistics in Vietnam. His highly popular workshops have attracted and improved research capacity for thousands of doctors, health care professionals, and scientists. He has co-founded a bone and muscle research laboratory in Vietnam where landed many large scale clinical and research projects, including the Vietnam Osteoporosis Study (VOS).

After completing his doctor of medicine and specialist training in Obstetrics & Gynaecology (OG), Dr. Tran completed his PhD on clinical epidemiology of nosocomial infection in OG at Prince of Songkla University in 1999. He previously worked as both a senior consultant in OG and a university lecturer in Vietnam until 2011 when he migrated to Australia. He was also working as a technical consultant and member of World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline development groups in management of high risk pregnancy (2006-2014), and a primary statistician for several large randomized controlled trials in Australia (2011-2014).

Research interests

Dr Thach Tran has extensive experience in experimental design and data analysis, including modelling complex longitudinal related data, developing a prediction model, and analyzing linked health care data, as well as managing big and complex datasets, particularly nation-wide linked data.

Since 2014, Dr Tran has been playing an important role in the analysis of observational data from several large prospective cohorts to determine the contribution of fragility fractures on mortality and develop a model for predicting the conceptual risks of both fragility fractures and mortality in the elderly. He is interested in the implementation of novel and robust statistical analysis approaches to investigate the trajectories to subsequent hospital admissions and mortality following specific fragility fractures, and the interactions between multimorbidity and post-fracture mortality.

Doctor Bich Tran, PhD is a Lead Data Analyst at the Bureau of Health Information, a pillar of the New South Wales’s Department of Health, Australia. She leads a team to report patient experience among those utilising public health services, providing trends and benchmarks at state and local health districts. She acts as the technical advisor through the production phases, providing strategic and sophisticated analyses, interpretation and expert advice on survey analyses.

Prior to that, Dr Bich Tran was a research fellow in health services research based at the Centre for Big Data Research in Health at UNSW Australia. She was awarded her PhD in Medicine from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in late 2010. Her thesis was nested in the world’ longest population-based Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study, where her focus was specifically on using genetic and clinical data to develop predictive models for personalised fracture risk. She spent two-year post-doctoral training in epidemiological research at the QIMR Berghofer.

Research interests

Dr Bich Tran brings high-level skills in applying advanced statistical methods to large-scale datasets. She has background and knowledge from work experience both in genetic epidemiology to health services research, bringing 'big data' skills honed in bioinformatics and genomics to research using administrative and cohort study data. She has formal training in the use of advanced statistical analysis and linked data. Dr Tran is highly capable with the open-source R statistics language which she has applied in various projects. She has a proven track record of managing projects on health services research by publishing her research in peer-reviewed international journals.

Dr. Minh C. Doan is a graduate of Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine, where he became a lecturer of internal medicine Department in 2012.

Dr. Minh has been practicing in the Department of Rheumatology at the Nguyen Tri Phuong Hospital, Ho Chi Minh city since 2016.

His practice focuses on osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease and works in several studies of Division of Bone and Muscle Research, Ton Duc Thang University.

He currently has 7 publications in international medical journals such as Scientific Reports, Bone, Osteoporosis International, Plos One, Calcified Tissue International, etc.

Dr. Minh was also awarded the First prize of 16th and 17th Science and Technology Conference of Medicine in 2012 and 2014 for his contributions to the understanding of prevalence of Osteoarthritis of knee and percent body fat cut-off for obesity in Viet Nam.

Dr Khuong-Duy Hoang graduated from the Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine with an MD. He has been a Research Assistant of BMRg and is responsible for the mechanography assessment of falls.

Dr Hoang has experience measuring muscle strengths and fall assessment using the Leonardo Mechanography system.

He has published two papers, including the one in the prestigious Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle (one of the top 10 journals in internal medicine and geriatric medicine). In 2022, he was awarded a UTS PhD scholarship to undertake his doctoral study in the epidemiology of Knee Osteoarthritis.

Publications:

Hoang DK, Le MN, Vo-Thi UP, Nguyen HG, Ho-Pham LT, Nguyen TV. Mechanography assessment of fall risk in older adults: the Vietnam Osteoporosis Study. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle. Published online 30/6/2021. The Journal is ranked as one of the top 10 journals in internal medicine and geriatric medicine(IF12.9). https://doi.org/10.1002/jcsm.12751.

Hoang DK, Doan MC, Mai LD, Ho-Le TP, Ho-Pham LT. Burden of osteoporosis in Vietnam: an analysis of population risk. PLOS ONE. 2021;16(6): e0252592. PLoS ONE is a leading Open Access journal for multidisciplinary science (IF 3.2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252592