Khoi is a fourth-year PhD student in Sociology at WashU. He gravitates toward using computational methods and large datasets to pursue questions about race, social movements, stratification, and the criminal-legal system. As of September 2026, his research is forthcoming in The Sociological Quarterly and is under review at several journals. In his first solo paper, “Crisis Control through Administrative Records: Systematic Inconsistencies in Police Data about Stopped Motorists’ Races, 2003-2025” (under review), he challenges the commonly presumed value-neutrality of administrative records produced by law enforcement and institutions alike by linking 730,000+ traffic stops with motorists’ voter registration records and identifying patterned inconsistencies between officer-classified and motorists’ self-identified races. He shows that from early/mid-2012 to mid-2014, Florida police write down self-identified Black motorists as White at substantially higher rates, which he through abductive reasoning attributes to the high-profile killing of Trayvon Martin (Feb. 2012) and the subsequently triggered institutional crisis to advance the argument that police race data are inherently a legibility project and should be interpreted as such. Khoi is currently working on his dissertation proposal.

 

Khoi completed his B.A. in Political Science in 2023 at New York University Abu Dhabi, graduating as a University Honors Scholar. His work has received institutional and financial support from Washington University's Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Equity and Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, & Public Policy and from NYU's Office of Inclusion & Diversity and Center for Technological & Economic Development