Hoang Thi Than

Hoang Thi Than (born 1944 in Phu Cuong, South Vietnam) is the first woman to graduate from the Department of Geological Engineering of Laval University in Quebec and the first female Vietnamese geological engineer and archaeologist. Raised in Saigon, she won a Canadian government scholarship in 1965, chose geology, and graduated in 1969 as the only woman in her class. She then worked at the Geological Survey of Saigon, where from 1971 to 1973 she wrote her engineering doctorate under Henri Fontaine on the clays of southern Vietnam and their industrial uses and on the history of the geological surveys of Indochina. She analysed about a hundred clay samples with an X-ray diffractometer, reported bentonite in Lam Dong province for the first time in Vietnam, and in 1971 helped excavate a Sa Huynh culture burial jar site at Phu Hoa. She left Vietnam as a boat person in 1979.