Facts about Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall Biography
Jane Goodall was, in her lifetime, the most famous chimpanzee expert in the world.
A colleague of anthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya in the late 1950s, Goodall began studying the social organization of chimpanzees in 1960, in what is now Tanzania. She obtained her PhD from Cambridge in 1965, and in 1967 she established Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Research Centre. Her research, based on extensive field work, is considered a milestone in the study of chimpanzees.
Goodall served as a visiting professor at Stanford University (1971-75), Tufts University (1987-88), the University of Southern California (1990) and Cornell University (1996-2002), and startingin 1973, held a position at Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam for many years.
Goodall was the author of several books, including In the Shadow of Man and My Life With The Chimpanzees, and in 1995 she was presented the CBE by Queen Elizabeth II. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, and lectured around the world, making appearances to support animal welfare and conservation. She was, in fact, on tour when she died in 2025.
Extra credit
Jane Goodall was married twice. Her first marriage was to photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick, making her the Baroness van Lawick-Goodall; that marriage lasted from 1964 until their divorce in 1974. They had one son, Hugo, born in 1967. Goodall then was married to Derek Bryceson, the director of Tanzania’s national parks, from 1975 until his death in 1980.