Sofia Freitas
Champalimaud Foundation
Lisbon, PTSofia Freitas is a PhD student at the Champalimaud Research Programme in Lisbon, where she works under the supervision of Joseph J. Paton and Alfonso Renart. She originally trained in Engineering Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico before moving into neuroscience.
In her doctoral work, Sofia studies how the brain organizes actions in time, asking both when we act and how vigorously we do so. She approaches these questions from a behavioral perspective, designing tasks that reveal the principles animals live by and then probing the neural mechanisms that implement them. Her methods combine behavioral assays in rats with dopamine recordings and large-scale neural population measurements.
More broadly, Sofia is interested in uncovering the algorithms that shape behavior in light of biological and environmental constraints. Coming from a background in gravitation, she especially enjoys exploring how the brain represents time — a fourth dimension as fundamental as space, and one that must be integrated into every action. She sees this bridging of perspectives as a way to link fundamental questions across disciplines and to understand how coordinated neural activity gives rise to flexible behavior.
