Biology Ph.D. student Venetia Briggs was collecting data on the mating habits of red-eyed tree frogs in her native Belize when renegade poachers of the rare xate leaf infiltrated her research station. She, along with four assistants and 16,000 tadpoles, evacuated the property and set up camp for a few months at her parents’ house several towns away. “We took over the whole house,” she chuckles. “My mom came home and found buckets of tadpoles all over the place.”

But Briggs’s parents didn’t mind. Her father, a British agricultural economist who specializes in environmental impact, and her mother, a florist from Trinidad, always imparted a deep appreciation of nature in their children. It worked. Briggs recently became one of 15 worldwide recipients of the prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO International Fellowship for Women in Science, which gives her a $20,000 research grant, renewable for a second year.

This summer, while preparing to defend her Ph.D. thesis (which shows that female red-eyed tree frogs favor larger males for mating), Briggs began a postdoctoral program at Boston University. She is studying communication signals, such as mating calls and flank color patterns, in red-eyed tree frogs. The fellowship will fund her fieldwork at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Attending the University of Miami had been a dream for Briggs since the age of 19, when she read a book on Belizean amphibians and reptiles written by UM biology professor Julian Lee, who became her Ph.D. mentor. Through her research at UM, Briggs discovered that the difference between frog and human behavior isn’t such a far leap.

“Like other animals, people are inclined to function on instinct,” she explains. “For example, take a look at how people react when somebody new walks into the room, how body language changes. Without a word, you can tell who likes that person and who may not.”

Briggs’s fellowship is the product of a partnership formed in 2000 between cosmetics company L’Oréal and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to increase opportunities for women in science. At a welcoming ceremony in Paris for the 2007 fellows, Briggs learned that women represent less than 3 percent of all Nobel laureates. “That’s ridiculous,” says Briggs, who has long been an advocate for women in science and leadership. She recalls being 18 years old and meeting a group of Belizean government officials while working at a conference center in the capital city of Belmopan. “They asked me if I had thought about becoming the first lady of Belize some day. I said, ‘No, but I have thought about becoming the first female prime minister.’”