Alexandra Basolo

In February, Basolo will begin a four-month Fulbright lectureship at the University of Padova in Padova, Italy, a Lincoln-sized city located about 20 miles west of Venice. There, she will expand upon research in behavioral and morphological traits that she has conducted at UNL, learn new research techniques and teach two graduate seminars. She will also help organize an international conference on Poeciliid, a group of live bearing fishes.

Basolo, who came to UNL in 1994, has been to Italy numerous times, including twice on trips as a teenager with her Italian-born grandmother. When applying for a Fulbright, she didn’t select her destination for its culture and ambiance; rather, she chose Italy because Padova is home to members of a research team dealing with questions about organisms similar to those she works with at UNL.

Basolo’s work focuses on life history traits—traits that are important in an organism’s fitness, such as how long organisms live, when they mature, or how many offspring they bear. She also studies predation, from microscopic parasitic predation, to the phenomenon of large organisms eating small organisms, as well as sexual selection, both males competing for mates and females exerting choice between different males.

“I believe that, to understand an organism, you need to look at it from a number of different levels,” she said.

At UNL, Basolo overseas a bevy of undergraduate and graduate research assistants and three labs filled with fish tanks, which hold several thousand specimens of primarily platyfish and green swordtails. Just down the hall, her husband William Wagner, also a professor of biology, manages a lab filled with crickets.

The Fulbright program, America’s flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its inception, the Fulbright program has exchanged approximately 273,500 people. The program operates in more than 150 countries worldwide.

Basolo is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad in 2007-08 through the Fulbright Scholar program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright, the program’s purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the rest of the world.