Thang was born in Saigon in 1954 to Chinese parents who migrated to Vietnam in the 1930s.
[1] He completed his Bachelor of Science at Saigon University in 1976, and worked as a chemist at SINCO, a sewing machine manufacturer.
[2] In 1986, Thang joined the CSIRO, the Australian government's scientific agency.
[2] In September 2014, research by Thomson Reuters for their citation laureate prize named Thang as one of a trio of CSIRO scientists (together with Ezio Rizzardo and Graeme Moad) most likely to be contenders for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in co-developing the reversible addition−fragmentation chain-transfer polymerization (RAFT) process.
[3] However, in December that year, Thang revealed that he had been laid off by the organisation in September, but had continued to work there unpaid in an honorary position.