Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall is an English primatologist and conservationist whose long-term study of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania transformed how scientists understand the behavior of humanity's closest living relatives. She was born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall in London in 1934 and grew up in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, where she developed an early fascination with animals.

Goodall did not initially attend university. She worked as a secretary and at a documentary film company before traveling to Kenya at twenty-three, where she met the paleontologist Louis Leakey. Leakey arranged for her to study chimpanzees in what is now Gombe Stream National Park, and later sponsored her doctoral work at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she earned a PhD in ethology in 1966.

Her field observations beginning in 1960 documented chimpanzees making and using tools, hunting cooperatively, and engaging in social behaviors previously believed unique to humans, findings that prompted a rethinking of the boundary between species. The Gombe study became the longest continuous field study of any wild animal population.

In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research, conservation, and community-led development around chimpanzee habitats, and in 1991 she launched Roots and Shoots, a youth program now active in dozens of countries. She was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002 and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.

The name Jane is an English form of the medieval French Jehanne, itself a feminine form of Iohannes, the Latin rendering of the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious." It became one of the most widely used English female names from the sixteenth century onward.