Tien Kieu


Tien Dung Kieu is an Australian physicist and politician. He has been a Labor Party member of the Victorian Legislative Council since 2018, representing South Eastern Metropolitan Region.
Kieu was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1961. In 1979, he and his wife Liem left Vietnam as refugees on a boat to Malaysia, where they lived in a refugee camp until they were approached by Australian officials and offered passage and resettlement in Brisbane. Kieu worked as a labourer before enrolling at the University of Queensland, beginning an academic career in econophysics which took him to the University of Edinburgh and Oxford University, and then to the United States as a Fulbright scholar at Columbia, Princeton and MIT, before returning to Australia to work at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.