The colonial tunicate Botryllus schlosseri: A key species for evolutionary developmental studies

I discovered tunicates while attending classes of Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates as a Biology student at the University of Padua, Italy. I was fascinated by the evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) approach while I was analyzing vertebrate adaptations looking at their sister group, the simple tunicates. I graduated in 1988 and subsequently entered my university's graduate program in Bioscience. In 1993, I obtained my PhD Degree in Evolutionary Biology. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my mentors, Prof. Paolo Burighel and Prof. Giovanna Zaniolo, who instilled in me a passion for tunicate research, a rigorous scientific working method, and above all a commitment to intellectual honesty in interpreting literature-based results, which I consider their most important lesson. In 1998, I became a junior faculty in my University, and in 2010 I was promoted to associate professor. Currently, I teach Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates and Eco-Evo-Devo and I am a member of the faculty of the graduate school in Biosciences. Over the course of 25 years of my academic life, I have had the opportunity to work as visiting scientist at the Universitè Paris XI (France), at the Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington (USA), and at Stanford University (USA). I have been also collaborating with members of the global tunicate research community and enjoy meeting them at the biannual International Tunicate Meetings.