Sophie has a background in ecology and field biology and is broadly interested in the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes, and the role of genomic architecture in driving local adaptation. 

For her dissertation, Sophie is studying the evolution of neo-sex chromosomes in Australian songbirds called honeyeaters. She seeks to understand i) how neo-sex chromosomes facilitate within-species and sex-specific adaptation across environmental gradients, and ii) the processes that act as motors or brakes of sex chromosome degeneration. The Australian honeyeaters provide a perfect system to study this, first because their neo-sex chromosomes are nascent compared to the ancestral sex chromosomes in birds, and second because many honeyeaters are distributed across an extreme environmental gradient from the cooler, wet coast to the arid, hot interior of Australia. Sophie incorporates genomic and transcriptomic data from RNAlater-grade tissues and long read sequencing to study these topics in a comparative genomic framework. Sophie is passionate about connecting natural history knowledge with genomic data and responsibly contributing high-quality ‘total-specimen packages’ to natural history museums, preserving all tissue types and associated metadata for future studies. 

Sophie completed her BSc in Biological Sciences from Cornell University in 2012 with a focus on Ornithology and Computational Biology, and her MSc from the University of Florida in 2018 in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. 

Selected publications:

Orzechowski, S. C. M., Frederick, P. C., Dorazio, R. M., & Hunter, M. E. (2019). Environmental DNA sampling reveals high occupancy rates of invasive Burmese pythons at wading bird breeding aggregations in the central Everglades. PloS One, 14(4), e0213943.

Orzechowski, S. C. M., Romagosa, C. M., & Frederick, P. C. (2019). Invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) are novel nest predators in wading bird colonies of the Florida Everglades. Biological Invasions, 21(7), 2333–2344.

Orzechowski, S. C. M., Shipley, J. R., Pegan, T. M., & Winkler, D. W. (2019). Negligible effects of blood sampling on reproductive performance and return rates of Tree Swallows. Journal of Field Ornithology, 90(1), 21–38.

Gulson-Castillo, E. R., Pegan, T. M., Greig, E. I., Hite, J. M., Hruska, J. P., Kapoor, J. A., Orzechowski, S. C., Ryan, S. J., & Winkler, D. W. (2019). Notes on nesting, territoriality and behaviour of broadbills (Eurylaimidae, Calyptomenidae) and pittas (Pittidae) in Tawau Hills Park, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club, 139(1), 8–27.