Vietnamese student wins two physics awards at once at world's No. 1 university

Tran Quang Vinh, an International Physics Olympiad gold medalist, was the only student to win two of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics department's academic awards this year.

The department's award listing, updated last week, shows Vinh won the Morse/Orloff Research Award, a $1,000 prize for a physics senior of high academic standing who plans to pursue graduate study.

The award was named after Philip Morse, an MIT physics professor and one of the leading physicists of the 20th century, and Joel Matthew Orloff, a former physics major.

Vinh also won the Barrett Prize, a $1,000 award for a senior undergraduate or graduate student in astrophysics. It honors the late Professor Alan Barrett's influence on the education of physicists and his contributions to the science and technology of astrophysics.

Tran Quang Vinh (R) and a friend on their graduation day at MIT, May 2026. Photo courtesy of Vinh's family

Vinh studied in the physics specialist class at Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted.

In 2021 he was one of three Vietnamese students to win gold at the International Physics Olympiad. The five-member national team also took two silvers and finished seventh in the standings.

He had earlier won silver at the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

He entered MIT in 2022. QS has ranked the university first in the world for 15 consecutive years, most recently in the 2027 edition published in June, and also first in physics and astronomy.

Vinh worked in the physics department and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

He is first author of "Gravothermal catastrophe in resonant self-interacting dark matter models," published in Physical Review D in August 2024. He is also first author of "Novel density profile for isothermal cores of dark matter halos," which ran in the same journal in March.

In 2025 he received an MIT Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

He is now a doctoral student in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology. His Google Scholar profile lists his research as large-scale structure, dark matter, computational astrophysics and machine learning.