Speakers at the “Africa: The Human Cradle" International Conference paying Tribute to Richard E. Leakey” on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University
By Daniel Dunaief
Combative, loyal, determined, consequential, energetic and courageous. These are just a few of the many traits paleoanthropologists and others shared to describe the late Richard Leakey at the “Africa: The Human Cradle” memorial conference at Stony Brook University this week.
The founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, Leakey, who partnered with SBU and received 34 grants from National Geographic over the course of his decades in science, was a part of nearly every presentation and discussion on the first day of the week-long event which closes tomorrow, June 9.
From left, Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis with Louise Leakey on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University
Held at the Charles B. Wang Center on the main campus, the conference brought together luminaries in the field who interlaced stories about their science in Africa with anecdotes — many of them humorous — about Leakey. Marilyn and Jim Simons, whose Simons Foundation announced last week that it was donating $500 million to the university, attended the entire slate of speakers on the first day.
Leakey was “one of the most important paleoanthropologists of our time,” Maurie McInnis, President of Stony Brook, said in opening remarks. His impact “can be felt across our campus and across the world.”
In an interview, former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenney, who helped bring Leakey to the university, suggested that he “put us into the elite of that whole research field.”
Leakey stubbornly entered his parents Mary and Louis’s chosen fields when he dropped out of high school, eager to make discoveries on his own and to contribute to his native Kenya.
In 1968, during a meeting at the National Geographic headquarters, Leakey “lobbied the committee to divert funding from his father’s money” to his own research, Jill Tiefenthaler, National Geographic CEO, said during her presentation.
‘Sitting on a knife edge’
Like Leakey, however, these scientists looked deep into the past to understand the lives of early humans, our distant ancestors and other organisms while looking for lessons that might help with the present and the future.
Dino Martins, Chief Executive Officer of the Turkana Basin Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, suggested that Leakey was driven by a sense of “childlike wonder” and a need to know “where we are, where we’re coming from and where we’re going.”
Leakey suggested that the extremely hot climate in Kenya was a potential model to understand how ancestral humans survived in hotter conditions, which are becoming increasingly prevalent amid global warming.
“There are many parallels in the past” in terms of extreme environments, Louise Leakey, director of public education and outreach for the Turkana Basin Institute and Richard and Meave Leakey’s daughter, said in an interview. “We’re sitting on this knife edge of really dramatic change now.”
In addition to encouraging science in Africa, Leakey also believed in engaging with students and researchers from a range of backgrounds and experiences. He wanted to ensure that people from every continent had an opportunity to join the ranks of scientists.
When presenting his research on Homo naledi, an extinct human with a brain a third the size of modern humans from South Africa who created burial sites and left behind etchings on a cave wall, Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, explained that he wished Leakey “had seen this and I think he would have been really angry with me.”
Words from a devoted daughter
In the final presentation of the first day, Louise Leakey shared memories of her upbringing and her father.
Among many pictures of her father and his discoveries over the years, Louise shared one in which she highlighted a pipe in the corner of the photo.She believed her father “rarely smoked it” but liked to pose with it in photos.
Louise Leakey speaks at the memorial conference for her father on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University
Louise Leakey recalled how one of her father’s partners, Kamoya Kimeu, proved a valuable partner in the search for fossils. When Kimeu died soon after Richard Leakey, Kimeu’s daughter Jennifer reached out to Louise to raise money for his funeral.
Louise Leakey has since learned that Jennifer never saw her father searching for fossils in the field. Rather, she learned all about his exploits when her mother read his letters each night to her before she went to bed.
A second generation of the two families is working together, as Jennifer has joined Louise in some of her fossil hunting work. The two daughters are also creating a comic strip, in many languages, that depicts the two of them hunting for fossils.
Leakey believes Jennifer Kimeu will serve as an inspiration to other Kenyans.
On the east side of Lake Turkana, Leakey and her team recently discovered the new head of a fossil. Before his death, her father said it was “time you found new skull.” Richard Leakey was right.
Turkana Basin Institute: Richard Leakey
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By Daniel Dunaief
Daniel Dunaief
What’s possible?
We can spend time criticizing each other, becoming nattering nabobs of negativity, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said. We can also rue our lot in life or feel an overwhelming sense of dread about problems we can’t solve or conflicts we haven’t resolved.
Or …
Or we can get out and create a remarkable life.
That’s what happened with famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey.
Okay, so maybe he had a few advantages, like the fact that his parents Mary and Louis Leakey were already successful in the field and, unlike those of us who grew up on Mud Road near Gelinas Junior High School, he spent his formative years near and around fossils.
I recall digging in the back corner of my yard when I was young, convinced that I would pull up a dinosaur bone or reveal some incredible secret someone had hidden among the prickers and weeds. Yeah, no such luck.
And yet, the life of the late Richard Leakey offers exciting hope and opportunities for inspiration.
He didn’t graduate from high school, but he was successful and world-renowned.
Leakey’s life is “awe-inspiring,” demonstrating the “ability of one person to literally transform the world and leave it a better place,” Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, said in an interview.
National Geographic Society CEO Jill Tiefenthaler described the impact Leakey had on his home country of Kenya as “amazing” and the impact on the field as “remarkable,” particularly because he did it in a non-traditional way.
In an interview, Tiefenthaler credited the “army” of people who supported him with helping him achieve his goals.
“How do you move and get people to move with you?” Tiefenthaler said. “He was this person who saw talent. It wasn’t just about him. He would see [someone] and say ‘you’re going to do this’ and they did.”
Next generation
As for how to get the next generation to believe in themselves and to participate in the scientific process, National Geographic’s Berger and Tiefenthaler shared their vision.
Ensuring transparency in the process helps people trust the science.
“People are with us when we find those fossils, they watch us, we make sure there’s open access when they come out,” said Berger, who considered Leakey a friend and mentor. “Your child can print these things out and they can check.”
For National Geographic, which funded Leakey for decades, the goal is to “try to give people information and let them draw their own conclusions,” Tiefenthaler added.
The next generation of scientists has access to a large educational program through National Geographic, she added.
“I spent my career in higher education,” said Tiefenthaler, who was the president of Colorado College for nine years before becoming the first woman to lead National Geographic in its 135-year history. “We have got to meet them where they are: they are probably not reading the paper magazine with small, dense print.”
National Geographic is on social media and TikTok.
“We are focusing on issues they care about,” Tiefenthaler said. “We know this generation is very concerned about climate change and biodiversity loss.”
Tiefenthaler “loves how much they care about the work we do at National Geographic [Society]. They’re a little mad at [this generation] because of the predicament that we’ve left the world in for them. We made the mess and there are fewer resources to fix things.”
Still, she believes there are leaders and actors among the younger generation who will follow in Leakey’s footsteps and have an important and positive impact on the world.
“We have a generation that’s going to make major progress on this planet,” she said.
Richard Leakey at the Provost's Lecture Series: "Living Off the Grid with Good Access to Energy and Water". Paleoanthropologist, politician, explorer and environmentalist, Richard Erskine Frere Leakey is chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), and Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University.
Famed paleoanthropologist, conservationist and SBU professor Richard Leakey leaves a lasting legacy
By Daniel Dunaief
A revered scientist, conservationist, Kenyan, and faculty member at Stony Brook University, Richard Leakey died on Jan. 2 at the age of 77.
Leakey made several significant human fossil discoveries, wrote books and ground breaking journal articles, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977, and saved elephants and rhinoceros from poaching.
Leakey, who received honorary degrees from numerous institutions including Stony Brook, was also a professor in SBU’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.
“I considered him my brother,” said former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenny, who had helped recruit Leakey to join the university and developed a close relationship with him over the course of over two decades. When she learned of his death, she was “devastated.”
The Stony Brook connection
Leakey was visiting Manhattan in 2001 when he met with Kenny and Lawrence Martin, who is the director of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). Eager to make a good first impression and “nervous about asking this great, incredible man to come and give a lecture,” Kenny got a manicure before the meal. “He wouldn’t have noticed if I had nails,” she laughed.
When Kenny learned that Leakey was in town to find new leg prosthetics after he lost his legs in a 1993 plane crash, the Stony Brook President asked if he had health insurance, which he didn’t.
Richard Leakey examines fossils at the Turkana Basin Institute.
“Jewish mother that I am, I said, ‘Richard, you have to have medical insurance.’ We arranged for him to be this faculty member at Stony Brook, who came for a certain amount of time each year to give lectures and work with students, to have students work on his digs,” Kenny recalled.
Leakey, who didn’t graduate from college, was proud of his role at Stony Brook and relished the opportunity to teach, several friends and faculty members recalled. Audiences appreciated the opportunity to hear about the most recent discoveries into human origins, especially from someone with Leakey’s world-renowned reputation.
He was just a“spellbinding public speaker,” said Martin, who first met Leakey when Martin was a graduate student in 1979.
“When [Leakey] got an honorary degree, he had two to three minutes to make an acceptance speech,” Martin said. “There was not a sound from the moment he got up. It’s one of only two occasions when the entire student body rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.” The other was when famed physicist C.N. Yang received an honorary degree.
Leakey was such a draw that he gave some of his bigger talks at the Staller Center for the Arts, which had to accommodate overflow space for the audience demand.
Patricia Wright, Distinguished Service Professor and founder of a research station Centre ValBio at Stony Brook, recalled how a primate conservation class responded to him.
In his provocative style, Leakey would come in and say something “totally outrageous,” she recalled. The students, who might have otherwise been starstruck and been inclined to write everything he said, felt compelled to speak and would respond, saying, “Wait a second, it shouldn’t be like that.” The class would then discuss a conservation issue with Leakey, which opened up an effective dialogue.
“They loved him because he was so charming and was able to turn their minds around,” Wright said. “I loved those classes and watching him with my students.”
In the world of conservation, Leakey took unconventional approaches that proved effective. In 1989, five years after the landmark discovery of Turkana Boy, a 1.5-million-year-old fossil of one of the most complete early human skeletons, Leakey arranged the burning of 12 tons of ivory tusks in Kenya, signaling that they belonged on live animals.
“We can absolutely say that there are elephants and rhinoceros that are alive today that wouldn’t have been alive if it weren’t for Richard Leakey,” Wright said.
Words of wisdom
In addition to leading by example, Leakey dispensed valuable advice, often over food he prepared specially (more about that in the None of the Above column in this issue).
Leakey “left me with a huge gift, the gift of being confident in what I’m doing, as long I’m doing it with principles,” said Sonia Harmand, Associate Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook. Leakey urged Harmand not to be “scared of breaking boundaries” and trying something nobody else had tried, she said. “Have faith in what you think you want to do. Never be afraid of being judged.”
Richard Leakey and Joe Biden in 2017 at the Stars of Stony Brook gala at Chelsea Piers. Photo from SBU
Harmand made a significant archaeological discovery, for which she received some skeptical comments. Leakey suggested that she consider such questions a point of pride and a reflection of the value of the work.
“You start to have enemies when you start to be famous and important,” Harmand said Leakey told her. It made her think she should be pleased that people were scrutinizing and criticizing her work.
Wright, meanwhile, appreciated how Leakey gave her the strength to live life the way she wanted. He urged her to put in the time and effort to work on politics and networking.
Several people suggested that Leakey, who battled physical challenges throughout his life without complaint, also inspired them. “He really taught me about courage and strength,” Kenny said. “I had the kind of courage that let me take on paths I didn’t know if I could handle. He taught me physical courage.”
Indeed, Leakey displayed the kind of physical courage and belief in his convictions people typically associate with a character from a Tom Clancy novel.
In 1967, Leakey was on a Kenyan flight that had to divert because of a dust storm. Despite earlier reports that the land in the Lake Turkana region was volcanic, Leakey thought he saw sedimentary rock, which could contain fossils. He rented a helicopter and landed with only seven minutes of extra gas to spare for the return trip. When he got out of the helicopter, he found fossils. He quickly appeared at a National Geographic meeting, where he urged the group to fund the search on the east side of Turkana.
The chairman of the society told him “if you don’t find fossils, don’t bother to come back to National Geographic,” Martin said the chairman told Leakey. The findings were more than enough for the group to continue funding Leakey’s research, including on the west side of Lake Turkana, where he discovered Turkana Boy.
Life-altering contact
For several of those who knew Leakey, the interaction was life-altering.
When he was a high school student in Nairobi, Isaiah Nengo heard a talk Leakey gave about plate tectonics and evolution.
“I was completely blown away,” said Nengo, who is now Associate Director at the Turkana Basin Institute.
As a second-year student at the University of Nairobi, Nengo attended an evolution lecture by Leakey. At that point, he was hooked, deciding to become a paleoanthropologist.
Nengo, whose parents’ education stopped around fourth grade, wrote to Leakey after he graduated from college, not expecting to hear back.
“It goes to tell you what kind of person [Leakey] was,” Nengo said. “This kid from the University of Nairobi out of nowhere writing him a letter, and he wrote back.”
Nengo, who said he heard similar stories from others in Kenya, including some who are currently colleagues at TBI, volunteered for a few months, until he got a fellowship.
He said Leakey helped fund a post-baccalaureate one-year program in the United States.
“The best gift you could get is the gift of knowledge,” Nengo said. “From [Leakey], I got the gift of knowledge, which changed the trajectory of my life.”
Like others who were prepared to change their lives after interacting with Leakey, Harmand had been in a comfortable job at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France when Leakey suggested she join Stony Brook and the Turkana Basin Institute in 2011. “I’m not sure I would have taken” the job, but for Leakey. The work was only supposed to last a couple of years, but she never left.
“He marked my life forever and my career forever,” Harmand said. “We also had a very deep friendship” that extended to the next generation, as her nine-year-old daughter Scarlett has forged a connection with Leakey’s granddaughter Kika, whose mother Samira is the daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey.
With three daughters, including Louise Leakey, who conducts field research at Turkana Basin institute, Leakey was a strong advocate for women.
Women are “equally capable as men and for him, this was not even a question,” Harmand said.
A passion for Kenya
In addition to being pleased with his connection to Stony Brook University, Leakey, who accepted the ceremonial key to a French city in his first language of Swahili, was a proud Kenyan. He set out to employ, train, include and inspire Kenyans in research projects and encouraged the children of staff members to come see the fossils, Martin said.
Leakey also helped raise money from people who traveled to Kenya to support educational fellowships. He contributed to the construction of maternity clinics on either side of Lake Turkana so women could give birth in safe, sterile conditions with electric light, Martin added.
Kenyans recognized Leakey when he traveled and appreciated his contribution to the country.
“We were driving to his farm, when we got stopped,” Martin said. “Everybody knew him and wanted to shake his hand and say hello. He was a local hero who was seen as a Kenyan doing things for his fellow Kenyans,” Martin said.
Harmand recalled one of the last times she spoke with him; he reiterated his passion for his home country.
Leakey made it clear “how important it is to involve Kenyans in what we do,” Harmand said. “We are training the next generation of human origin scientists in Kenya. He is the son of Kenya.”
A passion for science
While Leakey had a genuine interest in a variety of fields, he was, at his core, a scientist. Nengo called him a “polymath” who knew a great deal about a wide range of scientific subjects.
In one of her final conversations with Leakey, Wright said he took her aside after a meal she described as “exquisite” and asked her about bones she’d found in Madagascar.
The conventional wisdom about human origins in the island nation was that humans had come from Borneo 2,000 years ago.
In the middle of Madagascar, however, Wright had found bones from hippos and birds that had cut marks from humans that dated back 10,000 years.
Leakey told her that she “had to find those people,” she recalled. “You will be letting down all of Madagascar if you don’t find their origins.”
Wright said that conversation, which had its intended effect, was “emblematic of his burning desire to know and to learn about hominid history and the burning desire to collect and assemble pieces of history.”
Birthday presents
Leakey, who gave so much of himself to so many people, didn’t like receiving gifts, Martin said, but he welcomed receiving cheese, wine or cooking tools, including pots and pans.
When Leakey reached his 70th birthday, Martin asked him what he planned to do to celebrate. He had scheduled a sailing trip, but he wasn’t sure if he could pull together a crew. Martin offered to be a part of his crew for a journey that lasted over a week aboard a 38-foot catamaran.
Leakey’s daughters Samira and Louise joined Martin as deck hands, giving Richard Leakey the opportunity to take the helm during his journey along the coast of Kenya near his home in Lamu.
“When he was steering the boat, it was the only time he wasn’t challenged by his disabilities,” Martin said. “He didn’t need his feet. Driving wasn’t particularly easy. When he was sitting in the catamaran, it didn’t heel; it went fast, and he could steer the boat. Watching him, I had the sense that he felt completely free.”
Isaiah Nengo recalled a day years ago when he was working in a field station in Kenya, searching for fossils.
A man who had a tremendous influence on his life was on the way to alter his horizons yet again, although this time the visit would have nothing to do with science.
Richard Leakey, the late founder of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) and a famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist, was bringing food from his home on the coast of Kenya in Lamu to the field station.
Leakey “prepared this lobster meal,” said Nengo, who is native of Nairobi, Kenya, and is currently associate director of TBI. “It was my first seafood meal. It was fantastic. I was like, ‘I’m sitting almost 600 miles from the ocean, it’s hot as hell and I’m eating lobster.’ That always stuck in my mind.”
Leakey, who died on Jan. 2 (see a tribute to the Stony Brook legend in this week’s Arts & Lifestyles page B12), left behind a lasting scientific legacy that filled science textbooks of people around the world, while he left an enduring food legacy that filled the stomachs of family, friends, coworkers and colleagues.
People fortunate enough to dine with him shared tales of Leakey’s culinary prowess and refined tastes.
Sonia Harmand, associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook, took a long flight with Leakey to Kenya. Leakey had a salmon meal on the plane that didn’t meet his standards.
“He called the staff, and even the pilot came by to say hi because everybody knows about him,” Harmand said. Amid the introductions, he expressed his displeasure with the salmon.
When he returned to Kenya, he wrote to the airline and complained about the food.
As a host, Leakey went out of his way to make sure all of his guests enjoyed the food he purchased, prepared and served.
Harmand said her daughter Scarlett, who will turn nine in February, enjoyed eating at Leakey’s house because he prepared mussels and oysters he knew appealed to her.
“Every time you had a meal with him, he kept on asking if you liked it,” Harmand said.
Harmand also appreciated the unexpected gifts of incongruous foods at TBI. One day, Leakey arrived with ice cream and fresh strawberries.
“We had to eat it quickly,” she recalled with a laugh.
Another long time friend and colleague, Lawrence Martin, the director of TBI, said Leakey had a fondness for some Long Island foods. He particularly enjoyed ducks, as well as oysters and mussels from Long Island’s waterways.
“He said mussels were never as good in the warm water as they were in Stony Brook,” Martin said.
When he first got to know Leakey, Martin said Leakey cooked all the meals they shared, whether they were in Stony Brook or Kenya.
Martin called Leakey a “great chef” and said his late colleague “loved good food and loved going food shopping.”
While Leakey shared important information with former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenny, he also dined on memorable meals.
When they were on their own on Long Island without their spouses, Kenny invited Leakey over to her home for a meal.
After the dinner, he thanked her and promised he would return, providing she allowed him to do the cooking.
Sharing food with Leakey often meant benefiting from his storytelling prowess and his sense of humor.
Kenny and her family went on a safari with Jim and Marilyn Simons, co-founders of the Simons Foundation and supporters of science throughout Long Island.
“At the end of the day, we would sit in a circle and have drinks and [Leakey] would regale us with stories that were absolutely wonderful,” Kenny said. “You can’t even imagine how they made these [incredible] meals when there’s nothing out there to do it with.”
With hyenas howling at night and hot showers created with water heated by the sun during the day, the entire experience was “so exotic and so elegant at the same time,” Kenny added.
Harmand said Leakey didn’t cook with the goal of winning over people, but, rather, to share a connection.
“I don’t think he needed to impress anyone,” Harmand said. “He wanted to please you through food.”
Student Giancarlos Llanos Romero will be joining the SBU team on a trip to Kenya this summer. Photo by Phoebe Fornof
By Daniel Dunaief
In a region known for the study of fossils left behind millions of years ago, a team of students from Stony Brook University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences is planning to travel to Kenya this summer to learn about and try to solve the challenges of today.
The university will send eight undergraduates to the Turkana Basin Institute for the engineering department’s first program in Kenya, which will run for over four weeks. In addition to classroom study, the students will seek opportunities to offer solutions to problems ranging from refrigeration, to energy production, to water purification.
The students learned about the opportunity in the spring, only a few months before they would travel to a country where the climate and standard of living for Kenyans present new challenges. “We were skeptical about how many students we would be able to get,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who “didn’t start marketing this” until after he took a trip to Kenya and the Turkana Basin Institute, which Stony Brook created at the direction of world-renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey.
Giancarlos Llanos Romero, who is interested in robotics and nanotechnology and is finishing his junior year, had originally planned to spend the summer seeking an internship in the Netherlands or Germany. When he learned about this opportunity, he immediately changed his focus. “I need to do this,” Romero said. “This is much more important than anything I could do in an internship.”
On first blush, the trip is anything but ideal for Romero, whose skin is sensitive to extreme heat, which he can expect to encounter in the sub-Saharan African country. He didn’t want that, however, to stop him and is planning to travel with seven other people he met for the first time last week. Romero said his immediate family, which is originally from Colombia, supported the trip.
Sotiropoulos, who is in his first year as dean, embraced the notion of connecting the engineering department with the Turkana Basin Institute. “Before I came here” said Sotiropoulos, “I felt very passionately about making sure that engineering students became familiar with the rest of the world” and that they understood global challenges, including issues like poverty and water scarcity.
Sotiropoulos met with TBI Director Lawrence Martin during one of his interviews prior to his arrival at SBU. Martin invited Sotiropoulos to visit with Richard Leakey, the founder of TBI whose family has been making scientific discoveries in Kenya for three generations.
Women and children in Kenya searching for, and drinking from, water found beneath the dry riverbed. Photo by Lynn Spinnato
This program quickly came together after those meetings. The two courses will teach students about design thinking, said Robert Kukta, the associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Stony Brook would like to help students develop “the ability to think broadly about solutions and boil it down to the essence of the problem,” Kukta said. This, he said, will all occur in the context of a different culture and local resources.
Students will start their summer experience in Nairobi and then they will travel to Princeton University’s Mpala Research Centre, Martin said. “The journey through Kenyan towns opens visitors’ eyes tremendously to how different peoples’ lives are in different parts of the world,” Martin explained by email. “The goal is not so much to contribute immediately but to understand the challenges that people face, the resources available locally and then to improve their ability to think through possible solutions.”
Once students arrive at TBI, they will have an opportunity to see fossils from many time periods, including those from late Cretaceous dinosaurs. “Every visitor I have ever taken to TBI is amazed and in awe of the abundance of fossil evidence for past life on Earth,” Martin said.
A distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry at SBU, Benjamin Hsiao, who traveled with Sotiropoulos to Kenya in the spring, is a co-founding director of Innovative Global Energy Solutions Center. Hsiao has been developing water filtration systems through IGESC, which brings together TBI with universities, industry, international governments and foundations. He is well acquainted with the challenges the first set of students will face.
“Once we bring technologies over to Kenya, [sometimes] they do not work for reasons we have not thought of,” which include dust or a broken part for which it’s difficult to find a replacement, he said. “Those failed experiments give us tremendous insight about how to design the next-generation systems which will be much more robust and sustainable and easier to operate by local people.”
Acacia Leakey, who grew up in Kenya and is Richard Leakey’s grandniece, recently completed her senior design project as an undergraduate at Stony Brook. Her work is intended to help farmers extend the life of their tomato plants when they bring them to market.
About 32 percent of the tomatoes go to waste from the extreme heat. Acacia and her team developed a vegetable cooler that employs solar panels to reduce the temperature from 32 degrees Celsius to 15 degrees Celsius, which should extend the life of the tomatoes. Her classmates were “surprisingly supportive” of her work, she said, as some of them hadn’t considered applying their skills in a developing country.
Leakey, who will train for her master’s degree at Stony Brook this fall, will continue to provide insights into Madagascar, another developing African nation where the university has an internationally acclaimed research center. This summer, she will produce a video that will record information from villages near Centre ValBio in Madagascar, which she will bring back to Stony Brook in the hopes of encouraging others to use that information to create their own design projects next year.
As for Romero, who is raising money for the trip through a GoFundMe page, he is prepared to discover opportunities amid the challenges of his upcoming trip and is eager “to be able to actually help a community and say I left a mark.”
