Dr. Dame Jane Goodall, DBE, FUTURE

Founder, Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace

2010 marked a monumental milestone for the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) and its founder, Dr. Dame Jane Goodall. Fifty years earlier, Goodall, who is today a world-renowned Primatologist, Conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace, first set foot on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. The chimpanzee behavioral research she pioneered there has produced a wealth of scientific discovery, and her vision has expanded into a global mission to empower people to make a difference for all living things.

In 1977, Dr. Goodall established JGI, which continues the Gombe research and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. Today, the Institute is widely recognized for establishing innovative, community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa, and Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, JGI’s global environmental and humanitarian youth network, which has almost 150,000 members in more than 120 countries.

Dr. Goodall’s scores of honors include the Medal of Tanzania, the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, and the Gandhi/King Award for Nonviolence. In April 2002, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, named Dr. Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and she was reappointed in June 2007 by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. In 2004, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, Dr. Goodall was invested as a Dame of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a Knighthood. In 2006, Dr. Goodall received the French Legion of Honor, presented by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, as well as the UNESCO Gold Medal Award.

Her list of publications includes Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species are Being Rescued from the Brink, two overviews of her work at Gombe – In the Shadow of Man and Through a Window – as well as two autobiographies in letters, the best-selling autobiography Reason for Hope and many children’s books.

for more information, please visit

www.janegoodall.org and www.rootsandshoots.org.

photograph compliments of michael neugebauer.