Craig B. Stanford

Dr. Craig Stanford is a well-known expert on the behavior, ecology and conservation of primates and other animals, and on the biological roots of human behavior. He is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Stanford has conducted field research on primates, especially our close relatives the chimpanzee and mountain gorilla, and other animals for more than 30 years in Africa and Asia. He is known for his research on chimpanzee in collaboration with Jane Goodall, and for his work on the ecological relationship between chimpanzee and gorillas in forests where the two apes occur together. He is also a reptile biologist and Chair of the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, and has conducted or supervised studies of turtles and tortoises in Asia and Latin America. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards for both his research and writing, and is a frequent guest on radio and tv.

Stanford is the author of 175 scholarly and popular articles on animal behavior and human nature topics, including the widely used text book Biological Anthropology. Stanford has recently published Unnatural Habitat (Heyday Books 2024) about the ecosystem of Southern California, The Turtle Crisis (Turtle Conservancy 2024), about survival threats to turtles and tortoises in the 21st century, and The New Chimpanzee (Harvard University Press 2018) about the race against extinction for the great apes.