Meave Leakey, Director of Field Research at TBI and research professor at Stony Brook University’s Department of Anthropology, received the 2016 Hubbard Medal, named for the first president of the National Geographic Society, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, often called National Geographic’s highest honor. The award is given for lifetime achievement in areas of research, discovery, and exploration.
Meave Leakey in the field. Photo credit: Mike Hettwer, www.hettwer.com.
In addition to her positions at TBI and SBU, Dr. Leakey is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, a research affiliate at the National Museums of Kenya, and co-director of the Koobi Fora Research Project (KFRP).
Over five decades with the KFRP, Meave has helped uncover much of the evidence we now have for human evolution. Assuming leadership of the project in 1989, Meave and her team have made such groundbreaking discoveries as 1994’s Australopithecus anamensis, a new species and the oldest known hominin to date; and Kenyanthropus platyops, a new hominin genus and species announced in 1999.
