Primary fields of research

My work in Clinical Epidemiology and Public Engagement is articulated around:

(1) Developing and applying meticulous causal and prediction methods to generate real-world evidence for comparative treatment effectiveness and presonalised medicine: target trial emulation, individualised treatment rules, clinical prediction models. Read: Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine Research Using Real-World Data (1st Ed., 2026) | Debray, Nguyen, and Platt;

(2) Enhancing the understanding of real-world health complexity, by bridging the translational gap between serparate worlds of knowledge: advanced statistical/epidemiological methods, clinical medicine and pharmacy, philosophy of education, art, spirituality, and community building. Read: Nguyen & Kamper-Jørgensen (2023) | The sound of waves: tracking the pandemic and Nguyen et al (2024) | Opportunities for public health engagement with citizens in neighbourhood art spaces: the modern agora;

(3) Nurturing and sustaining the practice of compassion and kindness in research, teaching, societal engagement, as a concrete and immediate public health action in my everyday life. Read: Nguyen & Lee (2025) | Kindness as a Public Health Action.

I endorse the Excellence and Kindness in Research Training initiative, ELIS (see: Excellence and Kindness in Research Training). I value humility over self-promotion, I admire vulnerability over repressed emotion, and I trust word-action alignment rather than mere oration.

Teaching

I am responsible for the (co-)leadership of the following courses at the University of Copenhagen:

- "Statistics, Epidemiology and Social Medicine" | MSc in Medicine

- "Precision Medicine in Public Health" | PhD course

- "Playfulness and Connection in Teaching" | PhD course

- "Conducting and Reporting a Propensity Score Analysis" | PhD course

I am actively involved as a teacher in various other courses and as a supervisor (internship and/or thesis) in the BSc and MSc programmes of Medicine, Public Health Science, Global Health, and others.

I had the honour to be nominated for the Teacher of the Year Award (Årets Harald) in 2023.

Fields of interest

In addition to my research and teaching responsibility, I have created a novel platform for sharing societal reflections in the popular neighbourhood Nørrebro, Copenhagen, Denmark: a hybrid pop-up named nở · bro, which carries the idea of blooming and growing (nở in Vietnamese) and of bridging and connecting (bro in Danish). Inspired by the ancient Greek agora, during two seasons (Jul 2022 and Jan/Feb 2023) I ran this ‘novel agora’ to connect people around societal reflections with workshops facilitated by researchers, art exhibitions with works of local artists, community dinners and other social events. The core idea of this ‘bottom-up’ initiative was to break down barriers between creative disciplines and practices, to integrate societal reflections into culture and share experiences within the local community. Over the two editions, the novel agora welcomed hundreds of visitors. More information on Instagram: @no.hoi.bro.

Possible conflicts of interest

I have received remuneration for teaching causal inference methods using self-kindness as exposure, in a seminar for real-world evidence at Novo Nordisk, Søborg, Denmark.