photo credit Noel Rowe

Patricia Chapple Wright, PhD is an accomplished American primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist. Considered to be one of the world’s foremost expert on lemurs, Wright is best known for her 26-year study of social and family interactions of wild lemurs in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar. She is the founder of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE) and Centre ValBio (CVB).  Wright has worked extensively on conservation. In the late 1980s she spearheaded an integrated conservation and development project that, in 1991, led to the establishment of Ranomafana National Park.

Wright has received many honors for her conservation work in Madagascar. Among many other honors, in 1995, she received the prestigious” Chevalier d’ Ordre National” National Medal of Honor of Madagascar, from the President of Madagascar.

Dr. Wright is currently a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. She supervises students in two doctoral programs at Stony Brook: Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences and Department of Ecology and Evolution.