April 25, 2025

Grantee Spotlight | In the News | The Leakey Foundation

Three Leakey Foundation grantees were inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on April 25, 2025. Membership in the Academy is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive. ⁠

“On behalf of The Leakey Foundation, congratulations to Fredrick Manthi, Jenny Tung, and Peter Ungar on their induction to the National Academy of Sciences,” said Leakey Foundation President Jeanne Newman. “It is especially gratifying at this time that the importance of science is being rewarded. This honor highlights the importance of science to foster a better understanding of the world, improve the quality of life, think critically to solve problems, and address global challenges. As President of The Leakey Foundation, I consider it an honor to have contributed to the careers of these distinguished scientists.”

Fredrick Manthi, National Museums of Kenya

Dr. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi is a former Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellow and multiple-time Leakey Foundation grantee who received the foundation’s Gordon P. Getty Award in 2017. Dr. Manthi is a paleontologist and Director of Antiquities, Sites, and Monuments at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. Manthi’s interest in human origins was kindled as a child by the books on prehistory brought home by his father, who worked with Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge during the 1970s. Two Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellowships enabled Manthi to earn his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

He co-founded the West Turkana Paleo Project and has notably specialized in studying small rodent fossils, critical indicators of ancient environmental changes. In a landmark discovery in West Turkana in 2000, Manthi unearthed the braincase of a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus along with the jawbone of a later Homo habilis. These finds upended traditional theories by suggesting that the two species had co-existed for nearly half a million years, rather than evolving in a linear fashion. Support from The Leakey Foundation, he says, “helped shape my career as a paleontologist, and has enabled work that has made a significant contribution to understanding the evolutionary history of hominin and non-hominin species, and the environmental contexts in which this happened. Further, this support has motivated me to push for the training of more Africans in the paleosciences.”

Dr. Manthi is elected to the Academy as an International Member, a rare and well-deserved honor.

Jenny Tung, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology

Jenny Tung, PhD, is the Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), a Visiting Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University, and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Leipzig. She is a Leakey Foundation grantee who earned her BS and PhD from the Department of Biology at Duke University in Durham, NC. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Genetics and joined the Duke University Evolutionary Anthropology faculty in 2012. In 2022, she founded the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at MPI-EVA. She is a Kavli Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fellow, and was elected to the NAS in 2024.

Dr. Tung is interested in understanding how social behaviors, and the social environments they shape, influence gene regulation, population genetic variation, and ultimately health and fitness-related traits. This subject is fundamental to understanding human evolution because of the importance of social interactions in influencing survival and reproductive success—the currencies of evolutionary fitness. Dr. Tung’s work is grounded in evolutionary anthropology, but draws inspiration from evolutionary genetics, population genetics, and behavioral ecology. It also connects to outstanding questions about human health, where the pronounced effects of social adversity have highlighted the need for biological insight. Most of her work focuses on nonhuman primates and other social mammals, especially populations where it is possible to combine genetic or genomic analysis with data on the behavior, life history, and environmental milieu of known individuals. This combination is most clearly illustrated by her long-term research on the baboons of the Amboseli ecosystem, in Kenya, where she has co-directed the Amboseli Baboon Research Project since 2012.

Peter Ungar, University of Arkansas

Peter Ungar is a biological anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, recognized for his contributions to the understanding of the evolution of human diet and the impacts of climate and environment on food choice in living and fossil mammals. He grew up in New York City, received his BA in Anthropology from Binghamton University, and earned his PhD in Anthropological Sciences from Stony Brook University.

He is a multiple-time Leakey Foundation grantee who taught anatomy in the medical schools of Johns Hopkins University and Duke University before joining the University of Arkansas faculty, where he now serves as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Environmental Dynamics graduate programs. He is a Fellow of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has authored or coauthored academic papers on ecology and evolution in journals including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, and many others. He has also edited or co-edited three book volumes on human evolution, and is author of Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution, and Diversity, which won the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. His forays into popular science writing include Teeth: A Very Short Introduction, and Evolution’s Bite: A Story about Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins.

Dr. Ungar is known primarily for his work reconstructing diets and environments from fossil teeth with the help of automated surface characterizations. He has studied wild apes and other primates in the forests of Latin America and Indonesia, analyzed fossils from tyrannosaurids to Neandertals, and developed or co-developed new techniques to tease information about ecology and evolution from tooth shape and patterns of use wear. He has also conducted research on oral health of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. His most recent work focuses on developing new diagnostic tools for clinical dentistry and on documenting diet variation with environment in Arctic mammals to better understand impacts of climate change.