Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall

Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme. She has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues.

About Jane Goodall in brief

Summary Jane GoodallDame Jane Morris Goodall DBE is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. She was born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, to businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. As a child, as an alternative to a teddy bear, Goodall’s father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. She went to Newnham College, Cambridge, and obtained a PhD in ethology. She became the eighth person to be allowed to study for a PhD there without first having obtained a BA or BSc. She has stated that women were not accepted in the field when she started her research in the late 1950s. Today, the field of primatology is made up almost evenly of men and women, in part thanks to the trailblazing of Goodall and her encouragement of young women to join the field. She began studying the chimpanzee community in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, in 1960. Instead of naming the chimpanzees she observed, she gave them names such as Fifi and David, numbering them to have unique personalities. She found that it isn’t only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow.

She observed behaviours such as hugs, kisses, pats on the back, tickling and even tickling, even though we consider these actions to be what we consider human actions. In June 2006 the Open university of Tanzania had the occasion of conferment of Honorary Degree presented to Dr. Janegoodall for the award of the Doctor of Science degree honoris causa of the Open University of Tanzania. She now lives in London with her husband, David, and their three children. She also has a son, David Goodall, and a daughter, Jane van Lawick, who lives in Bournemouth with her mother and stepfather, Peter. She currently lives in the UK with her family and works in London as a consultant to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCG), where she is a professor of ethology and the director of the Centre for the Study of Chimpanzee Behaviour at the University of London. Her husband, Peter, is a well-known conservationist and author of the book Chimp Behaviour: The Rise and Fall of the Great Apes, published by Oxford University Press. He is also a former president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPCA) and a former chairman of the British Institute of Primatology (UK). Goodall was awarded a knighthood for services to the conservation of chimpanzees in 1998.