About Soph

me! -> 
and some of my students :)

 

Sophia Toubian is a proud double Bruin 🐻, currently pursuing a PhD in Information Studies 📊 at UCLA, where she also earned her bachelor’s degree in Political Science 🏛️ with a concentration in American Politics and a minor in Society and Genetics 🧬. Now in her fourth year, Sophia has advanced to candidacy. Her upcoming dissertation project is on “vibe” and the disconnect between information produced in expert domains and their public-facing representations. Her work aims to bridge the gap between experts and the public by creating more effective, equitable ways of communicating complex ideas. She is now writing her dissertation and teaching full-time. 

Sophia's academic journey has included international experience at the London School of Economics 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, where she earned certificates in International Law 👩‍⚖️ and Behavioural Economics 📈. Her research experience spans both north and south campus. She started working as a Graduate Student Researcher 🔬 in Christopher Kelty’s Labyrinth Project 🧫 at UCLA, where she specialized in project management, digitization, and collaborative research initiatives. She now works as a Graduate Student Researcher🔍 in Todd Presner’s Large Language Lab 💻 at UCLA where she mentors undergrads 👨‍🏫, works on computational ethical issues concerning Holocaut memory, and writes grants and papers 📝. 

As a teaching assistant for UCLA's Cluster program ✏️, Sophia designs and delivers engaging curricula, empowering freshmen to critically analyze the evolving digital landscape. She spent two yearas as part of the BodyMind Neuroscience Cluster where her Fall and Winter sections followed the larger curricula of combinatorial neuroscience, comparative literature, philosophy, ethics, and writing, and her self-developed Spring seminars tackled reflexive analogous understandings of the brain as a computer through the lens of NLP, popular media, and texts aimed at teaching computer programming. She is now teaching in the Biotechnology Cluster where her Fall and Winter sections explore DIY Biology, the business of biotech, and the ethical, social, and political implications of a society with access to biotechnological tools. Her self-developed Spring seminar focuses on what happens to scientific knowledge when it leaves the site of expertise and circulates through platforms, institutions, and AI systems. In a sense; how do we come to “know” a scientific claim once it leaves the scientific paper?

A multilingual scholar fluent in English, Farsi, Spanish, and Hebrew, Sophia is adept at connecting across cultures and contexts. Her technical expertise spans programming languages such as R 💾, Python 🔮, and SAS 📟, as well as data visualization and network analysis tools like Tableau 💿 and Neo4j 📀.

When she’s not immersed in academic pursuits (staring at her computer waiting for the code to write itself), Sophia enjoys pottery, reading Babitz, Batuman, Sontag, and Carson, and creating meaningful connections between people, ideas, and information.

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