In her work, Sophia Hunger focuses on the development and application of automated text analysis and machine learning in the social sciences, for example for gauging party positions or identifying protest events in newspaper articles. Her research draws on various digital and analog empirical sources, such as data from social media, surveys, parliamentary speeches, press releases, and newspaper articles.

After studying political science, anthropology, and economics in Munich, Copenhagen, and Chapel Hill, she received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2020 with a thesis on the populist zeitgeist in Europe.

Since 2020, she has conducted research on protest, social movements, mobilization, and radicalization at the Berlin Social Science Center as part of the MOTRA project (Monitoring System and TransferPlatform Radicalization). In this context, Hunger focuses on questions related to movements as a whole and their impact on the public sphere.