In her early twenties, Molena takes pride in possessing only two "superpowers". Her first superpower was getting accepted into multiple PhD programs in both Pure and Applied Mathematics at the age of 20, and her second one was working full-time in machine learning and deep learning at leading AI technology companies, while maintaining her PhD candidacy, and ultimately defending her thesis.
At the age of 20, Molena received multiple acceptance letters and graduate assistantships from both the Pure and Applied Mathematics PhD programs. After eight months of careful consideration, she was honored to officially start her journey towards the Ph.D. Degree at the age of 21, as an incoming first-year Ph.D. Student in (Pure) Mathematics at North Carolina State University, which she fondly referred to as her most treasured and remarkable _.phdjourneyat21._
In depth, Molena's most admired and honorable _.phdjourneyat21._ stems from her early beginnings as a secondary school student at the age of 11, at one of the most renowned Gifted high schools in southern Việt Nam, Trần Đại Nghĩa High School For The Gifted, where she specialized in English.
At the age of 15, she became a high school student at another nationally renowned Gifted High School, VNU-HCM High School For The Gifted, where she specialized in Vietnamese Literature.
At the age of 17, she received the acceptance letters and full-ride scholarships from multiple undergraduate programs in English and English Literature in the United States.
At the age of 18, she received her final prestigious academic award in Vietnamese Literature in \selectlanguage{vietnamese}{Hồ Chí Minh} City, Việt Nam, before moving to the United States to begin her undergraduate studies as a Freshman majoring in English.
Two years after first setting foot in the United States, at the age of 20, Molena received the acceptance letters and graduate assistantships from multiple Ph.D. programs in both Pure and Applied Mathematics. Following this, to prepare for a smooth transition to the (Pure) Mathematics PhD Program, she participated in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program in the very next academic semester, the Spring semester of 2021.
At the age of 23, Molena successfully completed her second year in the Ph.D. program in Applied Mathematics, passed three required written qualifying exams, and finished one of her most memorable semesters in graduate school with a GPA of 4.1665 out of 4.0000. She also received her Master of Science degree in Applied Mathematics at the end of the Spring semester of 2023.
Shortly thereafter, Molena was accepted into Ph.D. candidacy and started working full-time in machine learning and deep learning at leading AI technology companies, all while continuing her doctoral studies, maintaining her Ph.D. Candidacy, and ultimately defending her thesis.
▪️ 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.