Craig Packer (born 1950, Fort Worth, Texas) is an American biologist, zoologist, and ecologist chiefly known for his research on lions in Serengeti National Park.
[1][3] He is the founder and director of both the Lion Research Center and Whole Village Project, as well as the co-founder of Savannahs Forever Tanzania.
In addition, Packer has been a professor in the University of Minnesota's department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior since 1983.
[2] Since his graduation from Stanford University in 1972, Packer has become an active researcher and scientist, having published over 100 scientific articles and authored two books.
Packer has been ordained with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, a Distinguished McKnight University Professorship in 1997, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.
He ultimately abandoned his place in Stanford University's School of Medicine to work as a field assistant for Jane Goodall in Gombe National Park, Tanzania to study olive baboons.
[2] He later attended the University of Sussex to complete his doctoral research on baboons, graduating with a Ph.D. in Behavioral Ecology in 1977.
After a subsequent study on Japanese macaques in Hakusan National Park, Packer returned to Tanzania in 1978 as the head of the Serengeti Lion Project.
One of his biggest contributions to the Serengeti Lion Project was the discovery that successive outbreaks of canine distemper virus had different impacts depending on the rainfall patterns from the previous year.
Packer studied how severe droughts led to co-infections of canine distemper virus by a tick-borne parasite, babesia.
Packer also studied the effects of a full moon and its correlation to the number of lion attacks.
They also discovered that people in southern Tanzania are most at risk from man-eating lions in areas where they have to sleep in their fields to protect their crops from nocturnal crop-pests such as bush pigs.
Packer is married to Susan James and has two children from his previous marriage to Anne Pusey: Jonathan (1987), who is a pulmonologist in Sacramento, California and Catherine (1984), who holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins.
Packer, C., Kosmala, M., Cooley, H.S., Brink, H., Pintea, L., Garshelis, D., Purchase, G., Strauss, M., Swanson, A., Balme, G., Hunter, L., & K. Nowell.
Patterns in age-seroprevalence consistent with acquired immunity against Trypanosoma brucei in Serengeti lions.
Ritual vs. retaliatory killing of African lions in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania.