Anh, a native of Vietnam, came to this country in 1983 after years of living as a refugee of the war that tore her country and family apart. At the age of seven Anh was forced to flee south on foot with her extended family after losing both her parents. (Her mother died when she was a baby and her father was killed in Danang attempting to help his family escape.) She lost several more family members on the trek to Saigon. After the end of the war, because of her father’s background in the South Vietnamese military, life was an ordeal of terror and discrimination. When she was sixteen, her relatives helped her to escape the country by night. She was put onto a small, unseaworthy boat with several others. They survived heavy weather and cannon fire from passing patrol boats, eventually arriving safely in Malaysia. She would stay in a refugee camp for almost a year before being sponsored by family members here in the Northwest. She had studied English in the refugee camp and proved to be an excellent student, eventually earning scholarships and winning awards. She graduated from the University of Washington in 1991 with a degree in Math and Statistics and began working for IRIS in 1994. Anh met her husband Binh on the boat that took her to Malaysia. They have a beautiful son – AnhViêt.

Anh’s duties here at the DMC are many. She is responsible for data migration, request processing, and the automation of the data retrieval and processing. She is currently working on improving the internal workings of the data request processing mechanism.