Jane Goodall is the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees. Her pioneering research and discoveries have made, and continue to make, revolutionary advances in scientific thinking about the evolution of human beings.

Born in London, Goodall was 26 years old when she traveled to the Gombe National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, East Africa, and embarked on her landmark study of chimpanzees under the mentorship of famed anthropologist and paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey. She began by living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence — and what she eventually observed in the wild challenged virtually every conventional notion about chimpanzees. Goodall found highly intelligent, emotional creatures living in complex social groups. Most dramatically, her work revealed the surprising fact that chimpanzees, like humans, made and used tools. She also discovered that chimps were far from being passive vegetarians.

In her work, Dr. Goodall defied scientific convention by giving the Gombe chimps names instead of numbers, and insisted on the validity of her observations that animals have distinct personalities, minds and emotions. Dr. Goodall wrote of enduring chimpanzee family relationships, and, further along in her research at Gombe, she and Gombe researchers made the unsettling discovery that chimpanzees engage in a primitive form of brutal "warfare."

In 1965, Dr. Goodall earned her PhD in ethology from Cambridge University. Soon thereafter, she returned to Tanzania to continue research and establish the Gombe Stream Research Center.

In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute, which continues the Gombe research and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. The institute is also widely recognized for establishing innovative, community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa, and the Roots & Shoots education program, which has more than 8,000 groups in 96 countries.

Today, Jane Goodall spends most of her time traveling around the globe, lecturing, writing, teaching, sharing her message of world peace and hope for the future, and encouraging young people to make a difference in the world.

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Dr. Goodall's list of publications is extensive, including her latest book Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating, two overviews of her work at Gombe — In the Shadow of Man and Through a Window — as well as two autobiographies in letters, and the best-selling autobiography Reason for Hope. Her many children's books include Grub: The Bush Baby, Chimpanzees I Love: Saving Their World and Ours, and My Life with the Chimpanzees. Her book The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior is recognized as the definitive work on chimpanzees, and is the culmination of Jane Goodall's scientific career.

She has been the subject of numerous television documentaries and is featured in the 2002 large-screen IMAX film, Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees. In 2004 she was featured in two Animal Planet specials— Jane Goodall's Return to Gombe and Jane Goodall's State of the Great Ape. In 2005, she partnered with Animal Planet again to create a third special — Jane Goodall's When Animals Talk.

One of the most honored scientists on the planet, Dr. Goodall has been awarded the Medal of Tanzania (the only non-Tanzanian to receive it), the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal, Japan's prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Gandhi/King Award for Nonviolence, the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize, the Ark Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, the Encyclopedia Britannica Award, the Animal Welfare Institute's Albert Schweitzer Award, and, in 2003, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science (America's oldest science award), from the Franklin Institute.

In April 2002, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Dr. Goodall a U.N. "Messenger of Peace." Messengers help mobilize the public to become involved in work that makes the world a better place. They serve as advocates in a variety of areas: poverty eradication, human rights, peace and conflict resolution, HIV/AIDS, disarmament, community development and environmentalism. In 2004, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, Prince Charles invested Dr. Goodall as a Dame of the British Empire, the female equivalent of knighthood. In 2006, Dr. Goodall received the UNESCO Gold Medal Award and the French Legion of Honor, presented by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

Dr. Goodall has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates from such universities as Utrecht University, Edinburgh University, University of Dar Es Salaam, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Stirling University, Providence University, Taiwan; University of Guelph, Ryerson University, Buffalo University, Tufts University, University of North Carolina, University of Philadelphia, La Salle College, Salisbury State University, Western Connecticut State University, and University of Southern California, among many others.