The inaugural 2022 WorldQuant Global Alphathon — the BRAIN-platform competition WorldQuant has since folded into its IQC franchise — drew 14,000 contestants from more than 100 countries. The final was contested by 28 teams from 19 countries. First place went to Trinh Nguyen of National Economics University in Hanoi, a Mathematics Economics undergraduate whose full Vietnamese name is Nguyễn Đức Khánh Trình. The prize was reported in Vietnamese press as $20,000. He took the title ahead of teams from Wuhan University, Peking University, KAIST Seoul, and Vietnam's own National University of Civil Engineering — meaning Vietnam took both first and third place at the same final.

Trinh's win was carried prominently by the NEU Faculty of Mathematics Economics in a Vietnamese-language feature. His LinkedIn handle — trinhquant — and his post-Alphathon career as a Portfolio Manager (self-employed) suggest someone who built the win into independent quant trading rather than the standard WorldQuant internship pipeline most IQC champions follow. That makes him an unusual case: most named IQC alumni become WQ employees within months. Trinh appears to have gone the other way.

The 2022 Alphathon is the edition WorldQuant tends to under-count in its own messaging — the 2025 release called the championship "the fifth IQC" but WorldQuant ran a separate "inaugural IQC" back in 2018. The lineage is officially fuzzy. What's clear is that Trinh Nguyen is the named winner of the 2022 edition that lives between the 2018 inaugural and the 2023-onward modern IQC lineage. He's the strongest South-East-Asian editorial story in the IQC family before Tingoi's 2025 Kenyan arc.