Hien was awarded a highly competitive Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship and joined Centre of Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) in 2007 for her PhD. She then commenced her postdoctoral academic career in Australian Centre for NanoMedicine (established by UNSW in 2011). In November 2014, she joined the Key Centre for Polymers and Colloids, School of Chemistry, the University of Sydney, working on an ARC linkage grant with Dulux Australia. In May 2016, she joined the Institute for Biomedical Materials & Devices (IBMD), School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney as a Senior Research Fellow. Recently, Hien took up the position of lecturer in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research is multidisciplinary which focuses on the new concepts and ideas to engineer novel materials and devices at nanoscale. The ultimate goal is to utilize the nanotechnology in the form of nanoparticles to extend our life in two ways: i) early detection of life-threatening diseases and ii) improvement of their current therapy. Her research area includes polymer synthesis, fabrication and characterization of organic, inorganic and biocompatible nanomaterials for biomedical applications. She has extensive experience in understanding the interface between polymer synthesis and biomedical science. She is also interested in the development of powerful fluorescence microscopic techniques to study the fate of nanoparticles in the live cells.

Polymer synthesis,Drug delivery,Early detection of diseases