Pathfinder
Hang Loi escaped the Fall of Saigon and became a leading engineer for 3M. Now she hopes to inspire other women to take the road less travelled.
By Robert L. Smith
Her first airplane flight is one she will never forget. It was April 28, 1975. There was no jetway leading onto the C-130 Hercules, a massive military cargo plane. Hang Loi ’88 — with her older sister, younger brother and parents — carried hastily packed duffle bags up a long ramp that led into the gaping back entryway.
Dozens of families were already crammed inside the aircraft, which she noticed did not have any seats. Looking back, she saw thousands of people lined up behind her, trying to flee a city in peril. She was nine years old.
Loi and her family escaped the Fall of Saigon by catching one of the last flights out, an exploit she pieced together later in life. That desperate flight to the Philippines began a refugee odyssey that eventually brought the family to Toledo, Ohio, where they started over with little more than hope and determination.
In 1983, eight years after fleeing Vietnam, Loi started her freshman year at Case Institute of Technology. She decided to major in chemical engineering because she wanted a challenging career. Doubling down, she added a music major, too.
Loi’s dual CWRU degrees led to a job with 3M, where she become a leading engineer and innovator. She earned a fistful of patents and many company and industry honors. Recently retired, she’s now able to devote more time to one of her favorite pursuits — serving as a mentor and a role model. She hopes to draw more women and, really, people from all walks of life, into a profession she loves. It’s a quest for which she’s unusually well-qualified.
"Paving and widening the path for others to follow is really, really important to me.”
“I check off a lot of boxes” as an engineer, she realizes. She’s a woman, a first-generation college graduate, a minority, an immigrant and a refugee. She thinks she can help others find a path into technical fields and she thinks she should. At 3M, she saw how diverse, multi-cultural teams led to new products and solutions.
“Paving and widening the path for others to follow is really, really important to me,” Loi said. “There’s not enough people who look like me or speak like me, and there’s too few of my stories out there. So who am I waiting for?” Quoting Gandhi, she added, “You have to be the change you want to see.”
She’s a slight woman with a bright smile who talks with her hands as she grows excited about a topic, like science or engineering. She’ll poke her finger at the tabletop to make a point, or twirl her hands to illustrate a concept, the physics of a product.
Loi worked just shy of 35 years for 3M, a Minnesota-based industrial giant that invented everything from Post-it notes to the technology that makes smart phones glow brighter. As a product engineer, she attained four U.S. patents and nearly 20 international patents. Among her innovations: the reflective yellow trim that sets aglow the vests of construction workers and law enforcement officers.
In recent years, she’s been honored by both the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE) for serving as a model for what women in STEM can achieve. Now she’s stepping up her involvement at her alma mater. For years an admissions ambassador for CWRU, Loi recently joined the board of the Case Alumni Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Case Alumni Association.
She finally has some room to catch her breath. Loi and her husband, Rodney Ough — a chemical engineer from Nebraska — have finished raising their two daughters. Celina, 24, is a software engineer for Allstate Corp. in Portland, Oregon, and Jasmine, 26, is a physical therapist in a neurology residency at the VA hospital in Denver. Loi just completed a United Nation’s fellowship, where she researched barriers to women attaining patents.
Now she hopes to inspire hope and confidence in women interested in a career like hers. Maybe that begins with telling her story.
In 2022, SWE honored Hang Loi for recent patents she attained at 3M.
Dad and the kids’ first Christmas in America — and everyone’s first experience with snow, Toledo 1975. Hang is far right.
Holy Toledo
Hang (pronounced “hahng”) Loi will be forever grateful to Hope Lutheran Church. The congregation near the University of Toledo offered to sponsor all five members of the Loi family in 1975. That allowed them to leave the sprawling refugee camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas — their first landing in America — and start new lives in northwest Ohio.
Church members collected clothing, rented them a home, taught dad how to drive and got him a used car. They even found the family an old piano when they discovered the children could play. Dad was 53, mom 42. The children were 8, 9 and 10.
Lacking English skills, the Loi children were sent back a grade or two in school. They learned English with help from television shows like Sesame Street and through immersion, Loi said. At school, she wrote down every new word she saw on the blackboard, then brought the list home for her father to translate.
Vien Van Loi spoke five languages, including English. In Saigon, he had been an auditor for USAID — the U.S. Agency for International Development — a job that would endanger the family when the communists took control. Loi believes that helped him to secure a spot on a covert flight out.
Loi’s father landed a good job with Owens-Illinois, a major Toledo employer, but was soon laid off and had to make do as a tutor for Toledo public schools. Mom, Toan Ngoc Loi, a talented tailor in Vietnam, found work mending hospital bed sheets in a factory.
Money was tight in the Loi household, but the children earned the kinds of grades that attract college scholarships. Once they learned English, they began skipping grades. Dat, the younger brother, became a trilingual scholar and went on to Ohio State University for a degree in Spanish education. Both Hang and her older sister, Oanh, were the salutatorians of their high school graduating classes. They gamely applied to the nation’s best colleges.
Hang Loi, left, and her sister Oanh Loi Powell, reflected their Vietnamese culture at the wedding of Oanh’s daughter in June 2023 at Glidden House.
“Both of us were pretty motivated to find the most difficult school to get into,” Loi said. When Oanh Loi turned down MIT for CIT, Hang Loi followed her, passing on a scholarship to Northwestern. “Both of us chose engineering,” she said. “It happened to be a hard and challenging field, so that’s what we did.” When Oanh decided to double major in music, Hang did, too, adding piano classes to a demanding schedule of engineering labs and work-study jobs.
Blossoming in University Circle
The sisters roomed together for two years in Hitchcock House on north campus, where Loi says she made lifelong friends. Often, she was the only woman in her engineering classes and frequently the only Asian. But she believes CWRU gave her an excellent education and allowed her personality to bloom.
“Case revealed my exploratory streak,” she said. “I think it was the place where I gained my confident voice.”
She still marvels at the campus setting, the array of museums, and perks like free tickets to Cleveland Orchestra concerts.
“I always get too excited about how beautiful this place is,” she said in October, when she returned to an autumn-lit campus for a meeting of the investment committee of the Case Alumni Foundation. “You don’t find a campus with this kind of art, and a world class university, all in one place.”
She recalls brilliant professors like John Angus, who helped her to spend her junior year studying abroad in Scotland. She backpacked through Europe on $18 a day, and for the first time identified herself as an American.
“I became a global citizen at Case,” she said. “And I think it set the foundation for my career.”
Innovating at 3M
Loi earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Case Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in piano through the CWRU Department of Music. While she never played professionally, she believes music skills lent her an edge in innovation.
“Music gave me bragging rights,” she told Case students in 2021, when she addressed the annual SWE luncheon during Engineers Week. “It gave me confidence that I could do something difficult.”
She met the 3M recruiter on campus and started in a rotational training program that placed her in different labs and factories around the country. That tapped her wanderlust and showed her the opportunities. Then she settled into a job in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
As a product engineer for much of her career, Loi often served as the project lead, engineering lead, and manufacturing lead simultaneously. She led teams that took an idea from the lab and shaped them into a product “1,000 miles down the road,” she says. The roles required technical skills but also an ability to strategize, communicate and collaborate.
She’s obviously a very bright gal,” said John Vandenberg, her first supervisor at 3M. “Very pleasant. Always smiling. A bundle of energy.”
Vandenberg, who retired from 3M as the manufacturing technology manager of a division, said he’s a fast walker. But the diminutive Loi would match him stride for stride across the plant, then show her acumen at meetings.
“I remember once when we had to make a calculation, I reached for my calculator but she just spat out the number,” he said. “She’s probably a genius, but so likeable. Hang’s a shining star.”
For the company, she maybe shone brightest when she led a project that used physics to brighten the screens of mobile phones and laptop screens while consuming less battery power. Her team had figured out how to recycle light in multi-layered optical films, creating impactful technology. She was the only woman named on the pair of patents that resulted.
Mom and the kids in front of their new home in Toledo, October 1975. Hang is middle right.
'A possible path'
Loi describes a rewarding career but at times a lonely one, too. She wishes she had more mentors to guide her though a landscape where she always stood out. She gives herself some credit for perseverance.
“I stuck with STEM. I stayed technical in a very technical field, often as the only woman in the room, and I got things done. I’m very proud of that.”
“I stuck with STEM,” she said. “I stayed technical in a very technical field, often as the only woman in the room, and I got things done. I’m very proud of that.” So is Nora Lin, the former national president of the Society of Women Engineers. She wants more young women to hear Hang Loi’s story and see themselves in her profession.
Lin, a physicist, retired from Northrop Grumman as a chief engineer. She’s a longtime leader in SWE and served as the society’s president from 2009-10. She said women have made gains in engineering but too few.
Women make up about 22 percent of enrollment in engineering schools but only 15 percent of the workforce, Lin said. Women are more likely than men to leave a STEM career and are often reluctant to seek leadership roles.
“It’s become critical for women to feel comfortable, and stay in the field, and have a meaningful and successful career,” she said.
She thinks Hang Loi can help.
“If she can go to schools, talk to young people and say, ‘This is my story. Look what I’ve achieved,’ she’s showing them a possible path,” Lin said. “I think young women will be inspired to be like her.”
Forever Case
Hang Loi’s success is the success of a family, one now deeply rooted in Case Western Reserve. Her older sister, now Oanh Loi Powell ’87, also earned engineering (computer) and music degrees from Case. It’s where she met her husband, Michael Powell ’87, a mechanical engineer.
In June, the family gathered at Glidden House for the marriage of Oanh’s youngest, Liana, a classical musician. The celebration included Liana’s two brothers and Loi’s nephews: Tyler Powell, ’17, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and Evan Powell ’18, a systems engineer at Ball Aerospace in Colorado. He came with his wife, Madi Harris ’18, a civil engineer.
The wedding was imbued with Vietnamese traditions, including an ancestors’ table, which featured photos of mom and dad.
As she grew older, Loi came to reflect more upon her parents and what they risked and what they lost. They were older than most of the people who fled Saigon for the unknown, she said. Both left behind large extended families. Dad, who died in 1998, never saw Vietnam again. They made decisions she cannot imagine.
“My parents led courageous and resilient lives,” Loi says.
They were pathfinders, much like the daughter they raised.
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The Loi Ough family, from left, Jasmine, Celina, Hang and Rodney.