When RMBL spatial ecology research technician and winter caretaker Sophia Todorov first arrived at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in the summer of 2020, she had never been to Colorado, done fieldwork, or climbed a peak. Yet within days, she was posted in a high meadow with a spotting scope, learning to read animal behavior against a backdrop of the West Elk Mountains — a long way from her suburban Southern California hometown of Corona.

“My job was to look at marmots in a beautiful meadow,” she says. “It was dreamy.”

Sophia was exposed to science early on (her parents are both computer scientists), but her path to RMBL really started at UCLA. Initially, she was on a pre-med track, but volunteering at a hospital clarified that the career path wasn’t for her. “I knew I liked science,” she says. “I just didn’t like that environment.” 

By the end of her freshman year, her academic interest had turned to ecology. She emailed 10 professors in search of research opportunities, and Dan Blumstein replied first. In his lab, she processed samples from the long-running marmot project at RMBL. The following summer, she jumped at the opportunity to join the marmot field team in Gothic while also pursuing her own independent research project studying how marmot social networks influence their fitness under the mentorship of Conner Philson. 

The pandemic made her first RMBL experience atypical, however. The field station was operating at reduced capacity, everyone was confined to “quarantine bubbles,” and the five-person marmot crew carried the workload of a much larger team. Even so, the summer spent handling marmots, collecting data, and working on her own project, all while learning to code and analyze her own datasets, sealed Sophia’s interest in field ecology.

After graduating from UCLA with a degree in ecology and a minor in GIS, she returned to RMBL, this time as a winter caretaker. Off-season, Gothic is typically quiet, but Sophia’s first winter coincided with major atmospheric research campaigns in the valley, including the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL); Study of Precipitation, Lower Atmosphere and Surface for Hydrometeorology (SPLASH); and Sublimation of Snow (SOS) campaigns. Instead of just maintaining the campus with a few fellow caretakers, she helped scientists launch weather balloons, checked instrumentation sites, and gained hands-on experience with large collaborative projects. Along the way, she found that she loved the intersection of fieldwork and data science, especially when it connected directly to climate questions. And despite the fact that she’d never lived somewhere snowy and hadn’t been on skis since she was 10, she discovered that she loved Nordic and backcountry skiing, often skinning between field sites. 

Over the next several seasons, Sophia pieced together jobs to stay near Gothic year-round. During summers, she worked closely with RMBL staff scientist Ian Breckheimer, whose research, including his recent NASA-funded Colorado Headwaters Ecological Spectroscopy Study (CHESS) project, uses drones and remote sensing to scale up ecological measurements. Under his mentorship, Sophia deepened her expertise in spatial data, drone operations, and biomass modeling. The return of full, quarantine-free summers at Gothic also meant she finally got to experience RMBL’s tight-knit community and participate in traditions she had only heard about, including the Fourth of July parade, the legendary cabin crawl, and the No-Talent Show. 

In January, Sophia officially joined the RMBL staff as a salaried employee, balancing research support, campus maintenance, and science communication through social media (follow her Instagram posts at @rocky_mountain_bio_lab). But even as she’s settling into the job, she’s looking forward to what’s next. This fall, she’ll begin a PhD program focused on scaling ecological research with remote sensing. Leaving RMBL will be bittersweet, she says, but after four winters, she feels ready for the intellectual energy of a university campus and daily interaction with a larger group of peers. She’s also confident that her time at RMBL is far from over.

“The richness of data of long-term projects, the natural history knowledge, the people who have been coming here for 50 years, the community — all of this is super valuable. I feel like it’s unmatched,” she says. “My dream is to come back in the summers to do my field work and then return as a staff member.” 

— Suzanne Ennis
Communications Manager
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

Photo by Benn Schmatz