The youngest member of the famous Leakey family of fossil-hunters in East Africa, Louise Leakey has been true to form with her adventurous spirit, ambitious scholarship and unwavering focus on the advancement of science and our understanding of human origins.

A National Geographic “explorer-in-residence,” Dr. Leakey is leading the exploration and excavation efforts at Lake Turkana, Kenya, made famous largely through the work of her parents for its many contributions to the human fossil record.
 

Angelico Hall seats 800 and we had standing room only. I have never seen it packed like it was for her and I have to tell you… she is one of the best speakers I have ever heard. She is absolutely incredible how she mixes family history, humor, data, technology… We just love her.

Dominican University of California

Dr. Leakey co-directs the Koobi Fora Research Project in Lake Turkana with her mother, Meave Leakey. For the past 35 years, the rigorous process of search, excavation, and paleoecological and geological analysis in the Turkana Basin has made it one of the most comprehensive field efforts towards understanding the origins and evolution of the human species.

One of the mother-daughter team’s most recent and publicized discoveries was that of a new species, Kenyanthropus platyops, which extends diversity in the human fossil record back in time by over a million years. Joined by a team of Kenyan fossil hunters, they are also rigorously searching the rocky terrain for remains of animals that lived between four and one million years ago in an effort to reconstruct the habitat in which we evolved. More information on the Koobi Fora Research Project and the Leakey family can be found at www.kfrp.com and www.leakey.com.
 
Dr. Leakey also works alongside wildlife authorities to preserve the unique flora and fauna of Kenya’s remotest National Park and World Heritage Site. She is involved in several community projects at Illeret, a town close to the Ethiopian border, in an effort to improve the welfare of people on the National Park boundaries.

Piloting a light aircraft, a Cessna 206, across remote terrain, Leakey conducts aerial surveys, spotting wildlife and illegal livestock incursions into the Park, as well as ferrying scientists and supplies to their remote field stations at Lake Turkana.

Married with a young daughter, Dr. Leakey was recently selected, from a pool of 8,000 candidates worldwide, to participate in the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum. As one of the exceptional young leaders admitted to this unique community, she will engage in the “2020 Initiative,” the aim of which is to understand the problems and risks the world faces in the coming decades and beyond.

For the efforts of young scientists like Louise Leakey, paleoanthropology is evolving into an increasingly exact science. For at least another generation, the prolific Leakey legacy is sure to live on.