Dr. Nhàn is a research fellow at the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture & Society, Temple University since September 2006. He received a B.A. and M.A. in Theoretical Linguistics at San José State University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the New York University (1984).

Dr. Nhàn has worked in research projects in natural language processing at New York University with Prof. Ralph Grishman from 1979-1986 with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and with Dr. Naomi Sager since 1986, including support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Hôpital Cantonal Universitaire de Genève to produce a French medical language processor based on Dr. Sager’s linguistic string grammar. Dr. Nhàn has published in scholarly journals and conference proceedings with Dr. Sager. He has been maintaining the MLP since 1986, designed and implemented the MLP Preprocessor, helped formulate the XML design for the Structure Health Markup Language (SHML), as well as redid the Viewer design using XML and PHP. See Medical Language Processing and NYU Linguistic String Project.

Dr. Nhàn is an expert in computer character encoding of Vietnamese national latin quốc ngữ script, Vietnamese traditional ideographic Nôm script, and south indic Chăm script. During the early 1990’s, Dr. Nhàn was a liaison officer of the Vietnam Standard Committee at Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. As vice president of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation from 1999 to April 3, 2007, Dr. Nhàn designed and implemented Nôm fonts for artistic and research purposes.