About Soph

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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 third year, Sophia is writing her dissertation proposal on 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 hopes to defend her proposal in Fall of 2025. 

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 AI and Cultural Hertiage 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. Her Fall and Winter sections follow the larger curricula of combinatorial neuroscience, comparative literatiure, philosophy, ethics, and writing. Her Spring seminars tackle reflexive analogous understandings of the brain as a computer through the lens of NLP, popular media, and texts aimed at teaching computer programming. 

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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