Bảo Tiên Trần

“NỐI” means to connect. I believe music is one of the best ways to bring people together, helping them shine with confidence.

NỐI grew out of jam sessions, band practices and collaboration, turning it into a yearly stage for high-school bands across Ho Chi Minh City. Anyone is welcome to share their voice and their sound. With our passion for music, we raised money for underserved children, spreading love to everyone.

By its second year, NỐI had grown far beyond one person — I kept managing and coordinating the whole project as a bigger team joined to take it forward.

Coffee husk is about 45% of the coffee cherry and mostly thrown away — roughly 0.77 million tonnes a year in Vietnam. Our team optimised a two-enzyme system — pectinase + cellulase — to pull polyphenols out of robusta husk in plain water, then measured the antioxidant capacity of the extract. The study is written up as a research paper.

The project began in 2025 with coffee from Lâm Đồng, my home province and a major coffee region; a 2026 internship at Sơn Pacamara later showed me how coffee is really processed on the farm. As a next step, I’m applying the results: a capture box turns a sample into a photo, and a demo app converts its colour into a concentration — a possible way to measure without a lab bench. It is the same idea behind low-cost, point-of-care testing in biomedical engineering: bringing reliable measurement to places that have no lab.

I run HR, events and day-to-day operations for VL+, one of the biggest and best-known science clubs at Trần Đại Nghĩa High School for the Gifted.

My department showed me that running a science club not only looks like equations and knowledge, but also looks like budgets, paperwork, and last-minute changes.

Keeping a 30-person team moving, I learned to step out of my comfort — communicating with many different people and organising events on my own.

Outside of the classroom, I got many opportunities to involve myself in enriching the community in different ways. With friends, I organised a birthday drive and a reading corner at Children’s Hospital 1, and a day with children at Maison Chance, as we celebrated birthdays, played games, and simply spent time together. For children who spend weeks on a hospital ward, a shelf of their own books felt like a small way out of the room.