Born in 1950, Ms. Phượng Bùi Trân has been teaching since 1972 at various Vietnamese and French universities, as well as in programs developed by American universities in Việt Nam.

Convinced of the value of an interdisciplinary approach to research in the social sciences and humanities, she is fluent in both Vietnamese and French cultures. Her work focuses on the history of colonization as a shared history, taking into account the interaction and mutual influence between colonizers and colonized ; the history of women and gender ; the history of education and intellectuals ; the history of Vietnamese culture from a comparative perspective with that of China and other Southeast Asian countries.

Having been involved from the outset in the development of the Hoa Sen school, which was born in 1991 out of Franco-Vietnamese cooperation, she made a decisive contribution to the exemplary evolution of this private, not-for-profit establishment from a Bac+2 school to a école supérieure in 1999, then a university in 2006. She was rector of Hoa Sen University until 2017, when it ceased to operate on a not-for-profit basis.

Since early 2018, she has initiated the TEACH Program (Transform the Educative Aims by Change), which supports teachers and parents throughout Việt Nam. From December 2018 to March 2021, she was Chairman of the Board of Thai Binh Duong University in Nha Trang. She has since stepped down, to devote herself entirely to research, university teaching and community work in the service of education and gender equality in Việt Nam.