Elizabeth Lonsdorf walked up to greet her idol, primatologist Jane Goodall, in 1996 and, for the first time in her life, found herself speechless.

Lonsdorf was a senior biology and psychology major at Duke University in Durham, N.C., when her mother got her tickets to hear Goodall speak at an anniversary celebration at the Duke Primate Center.

“I got up to meet her and greet her and I just couldn’t think of an intelligent thing to say,” Lonsdorf laughed. But a year and a half after that initial meeting, Lonsdorf was sitting across the desk from Goodall at the University of Minnesota discussing what she would do for her Ph.D. project.

Currently the director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Lonsdorf has made yearly trips to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Africa, since 1998, to study tool-use skills and mother-infant bonds in chimpanzees.

Gombe National Park is where Goodall made her name conducting behavioral research on chimps. The park is only accessible via a three-hour boat ride, and Lonsdorf said it is typically a four-day journey from the U.S. to Gombe. Researchers have studied chimps here since 1960. It’s the site where the most long-term studies of the long-lived chimps have been done. (Chimps live to an average of 45 years in the wild, according to National Geographic.)

Today, Lonsdorf collaborates with Goodall on many projects and has co-authored several papers with the famed chimp expert.

“I know her much better now but her ability to strike awe in me has not really diminished,” Lonsdorf said. “I’ve spent time with her, I know her as a real person and not as a media figure or an international figure. But her ability to inspire does not wear off.”

Lonsdorf is working on two concurrent projects with the chimps in Gombe. These include the Gombe Eco-Health Project, which started in 2004 and investigates disease in chimp populations. The other is a project that Goodall began in 1974 in which researchers study mother-infant interactions in chimps.

“The bond between mother and infant is one of those things that is very, very similar between humans and chimpanzees,” Lonsdorf said. “The main difference is that chimpanzees have a single-parent system.”

Because there isn’t a marriage bond between chimpanzees, the primary relationship of importance is that between mothers and their infants. Lonsdorf’s research, which she conducts with a number of collaborators, looks at how that relationship affects chimpanzees as they grow. The question is: does the quality of care you get from your mother influence you later in life?

“Maybe you don’t hit your developmental milestones as soon or maybe you’re less dominant when you grow up,” Lonsdorf said.

Her research includes studying how different challenges affect quality of maternal care. These situations include disease, social bonds with other chimpanzees and relatives or dominance rankings.

Dominance is very important in chimpanzee societies, Lonsdorf said, and high-ranking females will give birth at a younger age and have a shorter time between having kids because they will attract more mates.

Another similarity between humans and chimps is tool use, she said. Chimps pluck plant stems, remove the leaves and then pull the stems through their teeth to make a sort of brush, which enables them to better gather termites for food. Lonsdorf compares this process to humans using forks or chopsticks.

“Studying chimpanzees is important not just because they are so closely related to us evolutionarily, but also because they are adaptable, behaviorally complex and have rich ecological relationships with their environments,” said Lisa Faust, research biologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo who collaborates with Lonsdorf on her chimp research.

Because of this, Faust and Lonsdorf agree that chimpanzee conservation is vital.

“It’s a tri-fold aim,” Lonsdorf said of her research with chimpanzees. “I like to study chimps because I think just finding things out about them is really cool, they are an exceptionally good model for understanding human evolution and behavior and they are an animal that is under dire conservation status at the moment.”

The chimp population in Gombe currently faces disease, the threat of poaching and habitat destruction.

“When we study and protect chimpanzees, which humans are so drawn to, we also protect the complex ecosystems which share the same space, which is important,” Faust said.

Protection of apes is also one of the main goals of the Fisher Center, which houses 10 chimpanzees, according to Lonsdorf. Steve Ross, assistant director of the center, said Lonsdorf’s work is especially imperative in that it clearly shows how apes relate to humans, emphasizing the importance of the conservation of the species.

“She’s a great scientist,” Ross said of Lonsdorf. “She’s done a lot in working with chimpanzees in the wild and the things she does are terribly important because they’re answering questions that few people are asking by taking an empirical look at chimps.”

Lonsdorf doesn’t plan on stopping her research anytime soon, both in Gombe and at the zoo.

“I’m planning to keep going as long as I’m able, as long as my legs work,” Lonsdorf laughed. “I’m lucky enough that I get to be at the zoo where I also have chimps right down the hall. Most of my days I’m sitting at a computer or working with students or working with data, I’m not actually with chimps and that can get pretty hard except that I have chimps right down the hall from me that I can spend time with.”