Khoi Ngo

Khoi Ngo (he/him/his) is a senior at New York University, Abu Dhabi. With a GPA of 3.9 (out of 4.o) and on a full-ride scholarship, he majors in Political Science with a minor in Philosophy. He is interested in identity politics, identity making, perceptions of diversity, and affirmative action.

Recently, Khoi has taken part in these projects:

Khoi was a Summer Researcher at Development Impact Evaluation (World Bank Group) for Summer 2022. He worked in a project tentatively titled "Assessment of World Bank Projects," where the team uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to build a knowledge graph of development economics research.

Khoi worked as a Research Assistant for Professor Adaner Usmani (Assistant Professor at Harvard Sociology) in Summer 2022 for his book project—From Plantation to Prison, which is under contract with Harvard University Press—with John Clegg (a UChicago historical sociologist).

Khoi continues working on his co-authored project with Professor J. Andrew Harris (Assistant Professor, NYU Abu Dhabi) on electoral fraud in Malawi, tentatively titled "Measuring Irregularities in Malawi’s ‘Tippex’ Election." Khoi has been mainly in charge of data quality checking, survey design (using Qualtrics), & data analysis and visualization (using R).

Khoi is conducting an Independent Study in Philosophy with Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (Department Chair, Philosophy at NYU), titled "The Philosophy and Politics of Affirmative Action." This is Khoi's second Independent Study course with Professor Appiah, following one in Fall 2021 titled "The Ethics of Identity Switching." Under Professor Appiah's supervision and as a result of the first Independent Study, Khoi solo-authored a 30,000-word essay on the moral defensibility of race play and is refining it for journal submission.

Khoi is working on his undergraduate thesis, combining his substantive interests in diversity and affirmative action with his methodological interest in survey data.

On May 22, 2022, Khoi had his TEDx Talk debut at the Ho Chi Minh University of Science in Vietnam, where he discussed LGBTQ-targeting affirmative action: its definition, its current landscape both globally and in Vietnam, and Khoi's 02 proposals: (i) multicategorical affirmative action and (ii) counting marginalization.

Selected work

Non-profit & Social Activism: Khoi co-founded Sex Speak Organization (SSO), an award-nominated NGO that was the first student-run organization dedicated to sex education in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. SSO—currently having 11,700+ organic followers on Facebook—has run various grassroots campaigns and hosted workshops at public and private institutions to advocate for adequate sex-ed training in Ho Chi Minh City and beyond. For his pioneering leadership at SSO, Khoi was named as part of Outstanding Young People of 2017 by Tuoi Tre News, one of Vietnam's biggest news outlets.

Research: In alphabetical order, Khoi has done research with (or assisted the projects of) Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU Philosophy), Professor Kanchan Chandra (NYU Politics), Professor J. Andrew Harris (NYUAD Politics), Professor Adaner Usmani (Harvard Sociology), the Center for Education Promotion & Empowerment of Women (Vietnam), the Governance Lab (New York, USA), and the People’s Participation Working Group (Vietnam).

Institutional Administration: Khoi worked with NYU Abu Dhabi's Office of Inclusion and Equity in Spring 2021 as an inaugural Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, and Equity Fellow, running its newsletter project and a survey project for the institution's first-ever campus-wide climate survey.