About Soph
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 second year, Sophia is writing her qualifying exams while researching and creating a new metric to measure information loss in public-facing representations of academic information. Her work aims to bridge the gap between experts and the public by creating more effective, equitable ways of communicating complex ideas.
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 includes working as a Graduate Student Researcher 🔬 with UCLA's Labyrinth Project 🧫, where she specialized in project management, digitization, and collaborative research initiatives.
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 Spring ‘25 seminar will 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, Didion, and Ernaux, mentoring aspiring researchers in her field, and creating meaningful connections—between people, ideas, and information.
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