Sofia grew up in São Paulo and trained at the Universidade de São Paulo before completing a doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Her research asks how children across radically different cultural settings acquire an understanding of other minds — and what cross-cultural variation reveals about which aspects of that process are universal. She co-leads the MIMB Consortium's 11-society false-belief study and is a principal investigator on the Growing Minds Cohort. She joined the Institute in 2019 and has since become one of its most prolific collaborators.