Sofia Landi, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Washington
Headshot of Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Independence Fellow Sofia Landi.

Sofia Landi is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Elizabeth Buffalo at the University of Washington. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She completed her doctoral studies with Winrich Freiwald at the Rockefeller University, where she focused on understanding the neural mechanisms that underpin how we recognize familiar faces and, in particular, functional differences between how we perceive strangers and people we know well.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Landi is focusing on the role of behavioral relevance in shaping hippocampal activity, uncovering how spatial and non-spatial hippocampal representations arise over learning. Her future work aims to understand how familiarity and behavioral relevance impact social information processing, leading to strong social memories that can last a lifetime. Landi was a recipient of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship during her graduate career and the Schmidt Science Fellowship during her postdoctoral work.

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