Vo Van Toi

Dr. Vo Van Toi served as a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University where he held a joint appointment with the School of Medicine and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He created the Biomedical Engineering Program and helped establish the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts.

Prior to his appointment at Tufts, Dr. Vo served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Biomedical Engineering Center in the Division of Health Sciences and Technology-a combined program of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his career at Tufts, while on sabbatical, he was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland. He also helped create, and was vice-director of, the Eye Research Institute in Sion, Switzerland. Dr. Vo Van Toi dedicated his expertise to helping Vietnam by co-founding the Vietnamese North American University Professor (VNAUP) network; by creating the Biomedical Engineering Consortium of Vietnam-International Universities and the Vietnamese Association of Biomedical Engineering. He was nominated by then President G. Bush as a member of the Board of Directors of the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF), a U.S. Federal Agency whose mission is to help Vietnam to enhance its higher education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine. He then took a leave of absence from Tufts University to become VEF’s Executive Director. During his tenure at VEF he established many initiatives. Among them the All the Ways Home movement to encourage VEF graduates to reflect on the best ways to serve Vietnam and the Academic Job Fair to attract the Vietnamese students abroad to the education environment in Vietnam.

After more than 40 years living in Switzerland and the U.S. Dr. Vo Van Toi resigned from VEF and took an early retirement from Tufts University to come back to Vietnam to become the Chair of the newly created Biomedical Engineering Department at International University of Vietnam National University-Ho Chi Minh City. He plans to create a magnet to attract the Vietnamese diasporas to help Vietnam in the higher education.