Jane Goodall

In July of 1960, at the age of 26, Jane Goodall traveled from England to what is now Tanzania and ventured into the little-known world of wild chimpanzees, where she lived as a member of a chimpanzee troupe for two years. Through nearly 60 years of groundbreaking work, Dr. Jane Goodall has shown the world the urgent need to protect chimpanzees from extinction. She has transformed our understanding of chimpanzees while redefining the relationship between humans and animals. Her discovery in 1960 that chimpanzees make and use tools is still considered among the greatest contributions to 20th-century scholarship. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, and to scale up protection of chimpanzees in their habitats.