The prize, given separately in eight developing countries including Vietnam, is named after outstanding Russian mathematicians and scientist Sophia Kovalevskaya and was instituted by American academic couple DRS Neal and Annn Koblitz in 1985 to recognize scientific research by women.

Tuoi is an pioneer in research natural language processing, machine translation and text processing.

After graduating from Slovakia in 19977, she returned to Vietnam to work and in 1985 defended her doctorate thesis on computer processing of computer languages.

Tuoi is now acting as a guide for two PhD these on finding English-Vietnamese phrases in machine translation and handling gaps between English and Vietnamese vocabularies.

As a two-time rector, she helped her university win the Labour Hero prize.