Sophia obtained her Ph.D. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015, where she was supervised by Prof. Mark Alford. After graduation, she then joined Prof. Andrew Steiner’s research group, working as a postdoc at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and a guest visitor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Sophia joined N3AS in 2018, spending two years at Ohio University working with Madappa Prakash, then moving to the Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, where she collaborated with Sanjay Reddy. In early 2022 Sophia joined the T. D. Lee Institute, Shanghai, where she is a T. D. Lee Fellow in the Particle and Nuclear Division.

Before coming to the United States, she completed undergraduate degrees in Materials Science & Engineering (major) and English (minor) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2009. Sophia’s research interests revolve around properties of dense matter on the QCD phase diagram and neutron star physics. She has been working on effects of possible phase transitions in neutron star Equation of State and relating them to astrophysical observations. She is also interested in constraining theoretical models of nuclear and quark matter with the aid of laboratory experiments and multi-messenger astronomy.