Sophia Smith Galer

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist, writer, speaker, and content creator, credited for pioneering astute, engaging journalism on TikTok.

In 2024, Sophia was named the winner of the Georgina Henry Prize at the Women In Journalism Awards for Digital Innovation, joining a prestigious list of past winners and becoming an honorary Women in Journalism fellow. She was also nominated for Education Creator of the Year at the first ever TikTok's UK and Ireland Awards, sponsored by Sky, as well as a space on the International Center for Journalists’ Disarming Disinformation Solutions Challenge - to develop Sophina, her AI tool that helps experts and journalists write video scripts & amplify their work online, which launched in June 2025.

Also recognised in British Vogue as one of 25 most influential women in the UK, Sophia was included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2022. She was awarded a British Journalism Award for 'Innovation of the Year' in 2021 for her drive and push for representation in newsrooms for younger audiences and the stories and platforms that matter to them.

In 2025, Sophia was part of the team winning team of Durham University alumni students that took the trophy home for their Alma Matter on Celebrity University Challenge on BBC Two, the final drawing in over 1 million viewers. She has also continued to present across BBC Radio 4, including its flagship show Pick Of The Week, documentary How To Save An Incel, and 4-part series Like and Subscribe: How YouTube Changed The World, where she interviewed Hank Green, Christina Brodbeck and more.

From hour long radio documentaries to viral short-form video, Sophia has produced and presented content on the BBC and VICE News across television, radio and digital platforms. She is a regular commentator across Sky News, and other recent broadcasting credits include BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme, BBC One’s Sunday Morning Live, The Blindboy Podcast, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, and guest presenting BBC World Service's Outlook. She also co-hosted the podcast, Where To Be A Woman, for BBC Sounds alongside Scaachi Koul, a show about pushing past the latest wellness fads to search the globe for the best wellbeing ideas and ultimately asks, where can women live their best lives?

Sophia began her career reporting across the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World News and building Webby-winning BBC social media channels before joining VICE News as a senior reporter, where she was until February 2024. Her multilingual reporting across Spanish, Arabic and Italian has helped her get to the story first in English-language media several times, including her reporting on a catcalling episode in Madrid that won over 25 million TikTok and Instagram views.

A regular columnist for The Guardian and iNews, her second book, How To Kill A Language, acquired by William Collins, about linguicide and language loss, will be a passionate, persuasive rally cry for language diversity, offering hope that a multilingual, and future, is possible. It is due for release in 2026 and has already sold it’s UK, US, Canadian, and Ukraine rights.

Following the publication of her first book Losing It: Dispelling the Sex Myths that Rule Our Lives, published by Harper Collins in 2022 to critical acclaim and was a No.1 Amazon bestseller in its category, Sophia is frequently called upon as an expert on media innovation, sexual health reporting, and TikTok across British news media. She is the only reporter in the UK to be both HEFAT trained to handle hostile environments and accredited via acet UK to deliver sex education. In 2023, she became a Visiting Fellow for Brown University’s Information Futures Lab where she has developed resources for combating misinformation and misogyny in British schools that she delivers personally.

An experienced and engaging speaker, Sophia covers a range of topics including innovation and disruption; how to work incorporate AI into the workplace; generational communication; gender equality; how to navigate mis-and-dis information; and the state of influencer culture and its ethics.

Sophia first spoke internationally about her work when she was invited to give a speech in Arabic at the United Nations Headquarters in New York aged just 22. Since then, she has delivered talks from the Royal Festival Hall to Google, including recently hosting the three interactive events, entitled ‘Critical Conversations’,  for Intelligence Squared and Sage & Jester where they discussed all things misinformation. She also chairs panels across the year, including at the Cheltenham festivals and the Web Summit, and has hosted Q&As with everybody from the CEO of Only Fans to trainspotter Francis Bourgeois.