Sophia is a professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. Dubbed a "chemicist" (in an accidental mis-translation by a German colleague), she has spent time as a postdoc at Technical Univ. of Dortmund (Germany), a postdoc in a chemical engineering department (jointly at UC Berkeley and LLNL), and was a graduate student at UCSB. She and her group delight in NMR spectroscopy, but have brought lasers into the lab, too, because why should the optics teams have all the fun? Hayes and her group work on optically-pumped NMR of semiconductors and spin orientation, but also on solid-state NMR studies of the structure of non-crystalline thin metal-oxide films, mesoporous materials for capture of carbon dioxide, and the structure of minerals.