Louise Leakey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Louise Leakey (born 1972) is a Kenyan paleontologist. She does research and field work related to human fossils in Eastern Africa. She first became actively involved in fossil discoveries in 1977, at the age of six, when she became the youngest person to find hominid fossils.^[1] In 1993, she replaced her father as field expedition leader for Turkana paleontological expeditions, in an arid and hostile environment. Today, together with her mother, Meave Leakey, she leads the Koobi Fora research project, which has been the main program behind some of the most notable hominid fossil discoveries of the past two decades, the most recent being Kenyanthropus platyops.

Louise Leakey received her IB from United World College of the Atlantic, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology and Biology from the University of Bristol. Later she received a PhD degree from the University of London.

Louise Leakey was born in Kenya in 1972, the same year as her grandfather Louis Leakey died. She married Emmanuel de Merode, a Belgian primatologist in 2003. They have two daughters Seiya, born in 2004, and Alexia born in 2006.^[2]