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Meave Leakey Paleoanthropologist

Biography

Meave Leakey is Research Professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Anthropology. She is also director of field research at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, a unique nonprofit initiative co-founded by the Leakey family and Stony Brook to drive research at one of the best locations on Earth for studying the origins of humankind. She was awarded the National Geographic's 2016 Hubbard Medal, its highest honor, in recognition of her groundbreaking anthropological finds and continued dedication and inspiration to her field of research. On a National Geographic-sponsored expedition in 1999, her team uncovered a 3.5-million-year-old skull and partial jaw belonging to a new genus and species of early hominin that Leakey and her colleagues named  Kenyanthropus platyops. She is also research affiliate at the National Museums of Kenya, a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and an African Academy of Sciences fellow.

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