About TBI’s facilities

TBI provides logistical support to researchers, greatly facilitating fieldwork in the remote and extensive Turkana Basin area of northern Kenya. By making available such necessities as lodging, camping equipment, laboratories, four-wheel-drive vehicles, fuel, and skilled field assistants, new and exciting possibilities in scientific research can be realized as never before.

History

In 2005, Richard Leakey outlined to Stony Brook University his concept to develop TBI to provide permanent infrastructure to enable year round research in this remote region of sub-Saharan Africa. The TBI philosophy is to facilitate and stimulate a wide variety of multidisciplinary field-based research and to disseminate the results through conferences, workshops, seminars and publications. The university quickly funded the Stony Brook end of the project. Fund raising began in 2006; construction of a long term field camp at the Ileret site commenced in 2007, was fully operational by year end, and was the site for the first Kenya-based Human Evolution Workshop in 2008. Construction of the first full field campus at Turkwel began in May 2008 and hosted international workshops in 2009 and 2010. A permanent scientific facility housing 60 international visitors has now been completed, with a comparable facility to be constructed at Ileret by May 2012.

Future

After forty years’ focus on pre-history, TBI is expanding research in the Turkana Basin to include climate change, geology, botany, marine science, entomology, alternative energy, linguistics, development studies, health care and other interesting disciplines. Historically, it has been difficult to study or address these as the logistics of mounting research, education or service projects have been a deterrent. TBI now provides the physical and human infrastructure to enable scientists to conduct research in this challenging region, in much the same way that creation of Antarctic research stations opened that region to the scientific community at large.

The Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) is a collaborative program of interdisciplinary scientific research working in affiliation with Stony Brook University, the National Museumsof Kenya, the United States International University in Nairobi  and others. TBI is a privately funded, nonprofit initiative, founded by Richard Leakey and Stony Brook University. The primary research focus is human prehistory and related earth and natural science studies within the Lake Turkana Basin.