Sofia Heras

Sofia is an M.A. student in the Developmental Psychology program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She graduated from Emory University in 2024 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a minor in French Studies, earning highest honors for her thesis on task-based variability in pain-evoked fMRI experiments. After graduating, Sofia spent two years at the Cohen Lab of Translational Neuroimaging at Boston Children's Hospital, where she worked to better characterize neural and behavioral effects of stimulant medication in individuals with ADHD using fMRI and real-time techniques like neurofeedback. She also contributed to work identifying autism biomarkers in individuals with a history of perinatal stroke. Sofia is particularly interested in understanding atypical development in conditions like ADHD and autism, and how this knowledge can inform more personalized treatment and earlier intervention. She hopes to one day bring this work back to her home country, Panama, and is excited to expand her technical toolkit with EEG and other developmental neuroscience methods.