Teaching+ Mentorship
Teaching
Sophia has been teaching in some capacity for: Loading.... She hopes to continue.
Currently, she is working as a TA for Cluster 71 at UCLA. For the two years prior, she was teaching in Cluster 73.
The cluster program initiative is designed to help first-year students successfully transition to UCLA. Unlike other GE courses offered at the university, Clusters are year-long, collaboratively taught, interdisciplinary, and open to entering first-year students only.
Cluster 71 is called “Biotechnology and Society” and examines how developments in biotechnology shape, and are shaped by, social, cultural, political, and ethical contexts. Drawing from genetics, molecular biology, medicine, science and technology studies, and bioethics, students explore how technologies such as genetic testing, gene editing, reproductive technologies, and personalized medicine move from scientific research into public life, alongside questions of risk, expertise, inequality, identity, and scientific authority.
In the Fall and Winter Sophia leads 2 two-hour discussion sections for the cluster. In the Spring she teaches her own offshoot of the class called “From Science to Vibe: How Biotechnology Becomes Public Knowledge” that meets once a week for three hours. The seminar examines what happens to scientific claims as they move from research papers into journalism, social media, search engines, and generative AI, with students tracing biotechnology claims to study how accuracy, uncertainty, credibility, and meaning change as scientific knowledge circulates.
Mentorship
2025
- UCLA Undergraduate Research Week - Billy Peir and Aditya Patil: “Using Large Language Models to Disambiguate Holocaust Interview Testimonies” (With Aileen Tang)
- UCLA Library Prize for Undergraduate Research: Best research project completed for the Cluster Program – Aidan Teeling: Borderline Bias: Gender Disparities and The Male Experience of BPD
Resources
- You can find the TA Syllabus for the Fall/Winter iteration of the 2024-2025/2025-2026 discussion sections here.
- You can find the Syllabus for the Spring 2025 iteration of Brain as Database here.
Sophia has been teaching in some capacity for: Loading.... She hopes to continue.
Currently, she is working as a TA for Cluster 71 at UCLA. For the two years prior, she was teaching in Cluster 73.
The cluster program initiative is designed to help first-year students successfully transition to UCLA. Unlike other GE courses offered at the university, Clusters are year-long, collaboratively taught, interdisciplinary, and open to entering first-year students only.
Cluster 71 is called “Biotechnology and Society” and examines how developments in biotechnology shape, and are shaped by, social, cultural, political, and ethical contexts. Drawing from genetics, molecular biology, medicine, science and technology studies, and bioethics, students explore how technologies such as genetic testing, gene editing, reproductive technologies, and personalized medicine move from scientific research into public life, alongside questions of risk, expertise, inequality, identity, and scientific authority.
In the Fall and Winter Sophia leads 2 two-hour discussion sections for the cluster. In the Spring she teaches her own offshoot of the class called “From Science to Vibe: How Biotechnology Becomes Public Knowledge” that meets once a week for three hours. The seminar examines what happens to scientific claims as they move from research papers into journalism, social media, search engines, and generative AI, with students tracing biotechnology claims to study how accuracy, uncertainty, credibility, and meaning change as scientific knowledge circulates.
Mentorship
2025
- UCLA Undergraduate Research Week - Billy Peir and Aditya Patil: “Using Large Language Models to Disambiguate Holocaust Interview Testimonies” (With Aileen Tang)
- UCLA Library Prize for Undergraduate Research: Best research project completed for the Cluster Program – Aidan Teeling: Borderline Bias: Gender Disparities and The Male Experience of BPD
Resources
- You can find the TA Syllabus for the Fall/Winter iteration of the 2024-2025/2025-2026 discussion sections here.
- You can find the Syllabus for the Spring 2025 iteration of Brain as Database here.
- You can find the Syllabus for the Spring 2026 iteration of Brain as Database here.