Van-Thai Pham obtained bachelor in Spectroscopic physics from University of Natural Science, National University of Hanoi in 2001. He pursued his master study in South Korea and graduated in 2003 with major in Optical materials for holographic storage. In 2005 he moved to Switzerland to start his PhD in physical chemistry at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. He obtained his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Majed Chergui who is the leader of a pioneering group in ultrafast X-ray and laser spectroscopy for molecular study. His thesis topic was solvation dynamics study of aqueous iodide using ultrafast X-ray absorption spectroscopy. During his PhD, he was also involved in studies of organo−metallic complex molecules using ultrafast laser and X−ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). After graduated, he continued his studies on ion solvation and their hydration structure under extreme condition using X-ray absorption spectroscopy during his postdoc at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL), USA. There, together with his mentor, he developed a new method named as X-ray absorption/diffraction simultaneous refinement (XADSR) that combines both EXAFS and XRD data for a simultaneous structural refinement.

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His study of organo−metallic molecules was further extended when he worked at Institut des Science Moleculaire d’Orsay (ISMO), France where he focused on artificial photosynthesis using sequential excitation laser photolysis. With the pump-pump−probe setup that he built, his team was able to follow the double charge accumulation process in a dyad chromophore- naphthalene diimide molecule. He did another postdoc at Soleil synchrotron, France, working on time-resolved energy dispersive X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

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Van-Thai Pham is currently a beamline scientist at MAX IV laboratory in Sweden. He and his team are developing a time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopic setup with a femtosecond time resolution to study ultrafast processes in molecules. He is also involved in time-resolved X-ray diffraction/scattering technique to study structural dynamics in 2D materials and proteins.