Professor Toshisada Nishida is this year's winner of the International Primatological Society (IPS) Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding research and contributions to primatology. The award was presented at the 12th Congress of the IPS in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 7 August 2008. Nishida will also be given the Leakey Prize for revolutionizing our understanding of ape and human evolution by the Leakey Foundation. He shares the prize with Jane Goodall. Nishida and Goodall are honored for their courage, perseverance and achievement in the field of primatology. They will receive the prize at the Leakey Prize ceremony which will take place in San Francisco, California, from 30 October to 1 November 2008.
Toshisada Nishida is professor emeritus of the Department of Zoology at the Graduate School of Science at Kyoto University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Primates. Since 1997 he has been a member of the editorial board of the Springer journal "International Journal of Primatology" which is published in cooperation with the IPS. He is also the current Executive Director of the Japan Monkey Centre. From 1996 to 2000, he served as President of the IPS.
Professor Nishida's research has included studies of Japanese monkeys, red colobus and bonobos. He is famous as the pioneering founder of the second-longest running field study of wild chimpanzees, started in 1965 in the Mahale Mountains, Tanzania. This project has revealed findings about all aspects of the natural lives of chimpanzees, from diet, technology and social organization to communication. Nishida has also helped training an entire generation of primate field researchers in Japan and provided research opportunities to several Western scientists at Mahale Mountains.
Moreover, Nishida is an advocate for primate conservation. For this cause, he lobbies for the conservation of great apes as a Patron of the UNEP's (United Nations Environment Programme) Great Ape Survival Project and has led an attempt to establish great apes as "World Heritage Species."
The International Primatological Society is a non-profit organization which exclusively serves scientific, educational and charitable purposes. It was created to encourage all areas of non-human primatological scientific research, to facilitate cooperation among scientists of all nationalities engaged in primate research, and to promote the conservation of all primate species.
The Leaky Foundation was founded in 1968 in honor of Dr. Louis Leakey, a prestigious anthropologist and an important contributor to the understanding of human origins. The Foundation is dedicated to increase scientific knowledge, education, and public understanding of human origins, evolution, behavior, and survival.