Elizabeth Lonsdorf Bridges Primate Research and Conservation

Some career paths follow a straight line with no falter. For Elizabeth Lonsdorf, her journey has been more of a full circle, with a few serendipitous points along the way. 

“It’s definitely been surreal,” she says. 

Graduating from Duke with degrees in Psychology and Biology, she has built a rich career in primate research, teaching and conservation. Now, she’s back on campus as a professor in Evolutionary Anthropology and the new Academic Director of the Duke Lemur Center, the place where she first discovered a fascination with primates. 

As an undergraduate, Lonsdorf had no plans to become a primatologist. She jokes that at one time, after watching “way too much L.A. Law,” she could imagine herself as a lawyer. A memorable lemur encounter and the guidance of her undergraduate advisors Carl Erickson and Peter Klopfer would send her down a very different path. 

“My sophomore year, I didn’t have classes on Fridays, so I asked Carl if he knew of anything I could get involved in,” she recalls.  

Erickson invited her to the Lemur Center to observe aye-ayes, a nocturnal lemur with an unmistakable appearance (one features prominently on the Lemur Center logo) and an even more unusual way of finding food. Erickson opened an enclosure and told her to grab a clipboard, sit in a chair under a red light and record everything she saw — a protocol she is quick to note is not allowed today. 

“I sat there in the dark, not knowing what to expect, when the branches rustled and this strange-looking creature cautiously came out and approached me,” she shares. “I was wearing black boots with shiny silver buckles, and the aye-aye came over and tapped the buckle on my boot. I thought: ‘I don’t know what this is, but I like it.’”  

The aye-aye was the venerable Endora, and the encounter was enough to hook Lonsdorf. She went on to conduct research with aye-ayes every semester after that, eventually completing her honors thesis on their percussive foraging behavior — the rapid tapping they use to locate food beneath tree bark. Endora set her on a career path studying how primates learn, behave, adapt and age. 

Lonsdorf earned her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in the lab of Anne Pusey, who later came to Duke. Working with Pusey, she studied the development of termite-fishing skills in chimpanzees at Gombe, the Tanzanian research site made famous by Jane Goodall, one of her early scientific heroes.  

Pusey was also working to digitize Goodall’s decades of chimpanzee observations, which had been recorded in paper files. For Lonsdorf, that work became another link in the chain connecting Duke, Gombe and the long-term study of wild chimpanzees. 

Her career then took her to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, where she led field research and helped establish a research center focused on the study and conservation of apes. She continued returning to Gombe to study wild chimpanzees while also expanding her work into zoos and captive primate research. 

Later, as a professor at Franklin & Marshall College and then Emory University, Lonsdorf maintained her long-term chimpanzee research. Now, back at Duke, she has two jobs with a shared foundation: understanding primates and using that knowledge to help protect them. 

As a professor, Lonsdorf will continue her research on great ape behavior, development and aging. Her lab will continue Goodall’s 60+ year legacy of documenting the lives of the Gombe chimpanzees, while also working collaboratively with the new Evolutionary Anthropology chair Melissa Emery Thompson, to conduct comparative work between their respective chimpanzee sites. 

As Academic Director of the Lemur Center, she has a different challenge: helping chart the center’s research direction for the next decade. She is deliberately taking her time. 

“I’m going to be spending a lot of time this semester just listening, and learning, and figuring out what our capacities and unique niches are at the Lemur Center,” she says. “I want to have a really informed direction going forward.” 

That means building on research already underway, including studies of hibernation in fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, as well as the center’s conservation programs in Madagascar. It also means looking for opportunities to connect existing strengths and develop new collaborations across campus and beyond. 

For Lonsdorf, the value of that work extends far beyond understanding an unusual animal. Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, for example, are the only known primates that hibernate — a biological trait that could offer insights into topics ranging from human physiology to space exploration. More broadly, she sees primates as a kind of living blueprint for understanding ourselves. 

“Understanding the diversity of primate physiology, behavior, cognition and aging processes — those are all an underlying blueprint that we share with them,” she says. “We study them to understand ourselves better, but also to be able to care for them and protect them better.” 

And because primates face mounting threats from habitat destruction, disease, poaching, the pet trade and climate change, understanding them is also inseparable from protecting them. 

“I believe the primate with the largest relative brain, humans, are obligated to protect the other primates and to try and understand them,” she says.  

“I like to think that one of our jobs is to use our big brains for good, which includes understanding and protecting our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.”