Sophia Wolczko is a condensed matter theorist specializing in method development for computational problems in quantum chemistry, materials science and condensed matter physics. Her previous work, supervised by Dr Vojtech Vlcek in the Chemistry department at UCSB, consisted of developing a theoretical treatment for the metal-insulator transition in organic conducting polymers using results from the GW approximation to the self-energy, a form of many-body perturbation theory, and from density functional theory and developing a framework to treat electron-phonon coupling contributions from highly occupied soft phonon modes in organic conducting polymers.