MASTER’S STUDENT

Khoi is researching intraspecific frill variation in centrosaurine dinosaurs. Aberrant frills showing particular pathologies and asymmetry have been found and collected for a long time. However, previous descriptions often gloss over them because they are not “representative” of the species. Documenting and quantifying these specimens may offer insights into the diversity and development of these elaborate structures and help us avoid accidentally naming new species based on aberrant specimens or devising classification schemes from uninformative frill characters. Khoi started preparing fossils as a volunteer in the Dino Lab in 2016 and is now supervising the evening lab. He also enjoys the outdoors and has assisted in fieldwork around Alberta and, most recently, Mongolia.

Khoi is from Ho Chi Minh, Viet Nam, and had never seen a fossil in real life before he arrived in Alberta in 2016. He completed a BSc Honors in Paleontology in 2020 at the University of Alberta and returned in 2021 to begin his MSc program. Undergraduate projects include descriptions of a Cretaceous Lebanese herring, the first lambeosaurine from the Albertan foothills, the northernmost microsite from the Foremost Formation, and a Centrosaurus specimen from southeastern Alberta, now reunited with its long-missing skull. Khoi contributed a Vietnamese abstract to an avian musculature paper published in 2021 in Integrative Organismal Biology.

 

CONTACT & OTHER LINKS

Email: khoi2@ualberta.ca