Grant from The Duke Endowment funds hiring of Duke Lemur Center academic director Elizabeth Lonsdorf

Duke University has been awarded $4.4 million from The Duke Endowment for the Duke Lemur Center (DLC), including support for a newly created academic director position. Primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf ’96 will join the DLC and the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology in this new role on August 1.

The grant strengthens the DLC’s research, education, and conservation missions through expanded opportunities for faculty and student engagement.

The funding integrates the DLC more fully into Duke’s academic ecosystem, advances pioneering research with translational implications for human health and environmental sustainability, expands hands-on learning for students, and deepens community-engaged conservation partnerships in Madagascar.

“We are grateful to The Duke Endowment for enabling us to hire Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a world-class primate expert,” said Alec D. Gallimore, Duke’s provost and chief academic officer. “Her impressive scholarly record and experience leading research collaborations will help catalyze efforts between the Duke Lemur Center and its partners across the university.”

The new position fills a need identified by an interdisciplinary faculty review committee last year. Working with Executive Director Greg Dye, Lonsdorf will be responsible for collaborating with Duke faculty and the world’s lemur specialists to clarify research priorities and galvanize greater campus-wide engagement with the DLC. Her appointment coincides with a shift in the Lemur Center’s administrative oversight to Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost of climate and sustainability at Duke.

“We are thrilled to welcome a researcher of Elizabeth’s stature to the Lemur Center,” said Dye. “She will expand our strengths in conservation, research in Madagascar and at the center, and public education programs by connecting us formally with science taking place all across Duke.”

The overarching goal of Lonsdorf’s scholarship is to understand the interplay of development and health in nonhuman primate behavior as a model for the evolution of human childhood. She began studying primates as an undergraduate student at Duke, conducting research at the DLC on the highly endangered aye-aye’s specialized feeding technique known as percussive foraging.

Lonsdorf completed her Ph.D. at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota, focusing on sex differences in the development of tool-use skills in wild chimpanzees. At Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, she was the founding director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes from 2004-2012. In the fall of 2012, she joined the Psychology Department at Franklin & Marshall College and led the reorganization and expansion of the college’s primate research programs. She moved to the Department of Anthropology at Emory University in July of 2022.

Lonsdorf maintains a research program focused on the interplay of health and development in wild chimpanzees. She is a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, a member of the board of directors for Chimp Haven, the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary, and the former vice president for education and outreach for the International Primatological Society.

“The Duke Endowment is pleased to support the Duke Lemur Center and the creation of an academic director position,” said Charles C. Lucas III, chair of The Duke Endowment Board of Trustees. “The Lemur Center is a remarkable institution that advances conservation, furthers Duke’s research and education mission, and shares this knowledge and experience with the broader Durham community and beyond. We are proud to be a partner in its important work.”

Founded in 1966, Duke Lemur Center is the world’s leading institution dedicated to strepsirrhine primate research, education, and conservation. The DLC has assembled one of the largest and most diverse living colonies of endangered primates in the world. Over its history, the DLC has housed, cared for, and made available for noninvasive study more than 4,300 animals across 31 species of nonhuman primates, including lemurs, bush babies and, at one time, lorises (together, referred to as strepsirrhine primates). Today, it houses a living colony of approximately 250 individuals, representing 12 taxa. Associated with the living collection is an extensive Biobank that consists of more than 25,000 specimens and a natural history collection housing 35,000 fossils and subfossils—the largest collection of fossil primates in North America.

There has always been a significant amount of research at the DLC, in Durham and at field sites in Madagascar. Key focal points include:

• the conservation mission— research and community-led conservation throughout northeastern Madagascar, and a conservation breeding program at Duke focusing on Endangered and Critically Endangered species
• studies related to human health— including age-related cognitive decline, especially with mouse lemurs
• studies related to sleep and hibernation—particularly with fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, whose hibernation practices might hold a key to long-range human space flight and therapies for coma management, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and trauma recovery

The DLC has also served as a resource for Duke courses, especially in evolutionary anthropology, ecology, and biology.

Based in Charlotte and established in 1924 by industrialist and philanthropist James B. Duke, The Duke Endowment is a private foundation that strengthens communities in North Carolina and South Carolina by nurturing children, promoting health, educating minds, and enriching spirits. Since its founding, it has distributed more than $5 billion in grants. The Endowment shares a name with Duke University and Duke Energy, but all are separate organizations.