University Park, Pa. -- Jane Goodall, chimpanzee researcher and renowned environmentalist, is the next speaker in Penn State’s 2010-11 Student Programming Association’s Distinguished Speaker Series. Goodall will speak at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, in Eisenhower Auditorium at Penn State’s University Park campus.
The event is free and open to the public but tickets are required for admittance. Tickets are available now for students – two issued per I.D. – and will be available to faculty, staff and the general public on Monday, March 21, based on availability.
In 1958, at the age of 24, Goodall, armed with her lifelong love of animals and a diploma from the Queen’s Secretarial School in London, sailed to Africa, to work with anthropologist Louis Leakey. After a year of working in Tanzania with Leakey, Goodall was asked to study chimpanzees on the eastern shore of Lake Tangnyika, estimated to be the second largest freshwater lake, at Gombe Stream Reserve. Only one other person had ever studied chimpanzees in the wild, and that lasted only two and a half months.
In July of 1960, Goodall, her mother, their African cook and his wife settled in for what was a disheartening first few months of research. But despite intense bouts of malaria and extreme isolation, Goodall and her team persevered and were eventually initiated into the ways of mountain life. After six months, the chimpanzees were more accustomed to Goodall and stopped fleeing at the site of her. Goodall’s patience and unrelenting study and observation led to new discoveries about the animal. Chimpanzees fashion and use tools, hunt and eat meat, care for their young for a long time, and are sociable and expressive, all traits that were previously thought as purely human characteristics.
Goodall earned a doctoral degree in ethology at Cambridge University and founded the Gombe Stream Research Center. Today, after 30 years of research, she continues her work dividing her time between Gombe, a home in Dar es Saleem (Tanzania) and the tours she takes to raise money for research. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute for Research, Education and Conservation. The institute currently supports three major programs and projects: field research activities based at the Gombe Stream Research Centre; the ChimpanZoo study of captive chimpanzees living in zoos or other captive colonies in the United States; and a conservation and care project targeted to both wild and captive chimpanzees, including those chimpanzees currently being used in biomedical research laboratories.
Distinguished Speaker Series tickets are available at the following locations and times:
Eisenhower Auditorium, corner of Shortlidge and Eisenhower roads, weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; HUB-Robeson Center, on Pollock Road, weekdays 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Bryce Jordan Center, corner of University Drive and Curtin Road, weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., all on the University Park campus; and the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center, 146 S. Allen St., State College, weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
For more information about the Distinguished Speaker Series and the Student Programming Association, visit http://www.spa.psu.edu/dss.html.