Dian FosseyGorilla Fund

The camp on the mountain

Dian Fossey founded the Karisoke Research Center on September 24, 1967, and named it for the two volcanoes it stood between, Karisimbi and Bisoke. Porters carried supplies up to the isolated camp, where tents came before cabins.

The exhibit in Musanze

In 2016 the research center opened the Karisoke Exhibit in its building in Musanze, with photographs, films, historical objects and interactive activities for visitors and local communities. The New Times of Rwanda pictured the Senior Advisor for the Gorilla Program, Veronica Vecellio, showing guests through a room given over to Dian Fossey.

The campus

The Fund calls the Ellen DeGeneres Campus the realization of a 20-year dream: its first permanent, purpose-built home. In February 2018 Portia de Rossi announced the Ellen Fund as a 60th-birthday gift for Ellen DeGeneres, with the campus as its first project. MASS Design Group designed the buildings, taking a cue from Fossey’s first tent: footprints that follow the slope, green roofs that blend into the land and gathering spaces that echo the camp’s fires. More than 2,400 Rwandans worked on the project.

The campus opened to the public on February 1, 2022, and was dedicated that June. Three main buildings carry their donors’ names: the Sandy and Harold Price Research Center, the Rob and Melani Walton Education Center and the Cindy Broder Conservation Gallery.

From a first visit to Karisoke

Fossey first traveled to Africa in 1963 and returned in December 1966. Louis Leakey encouraged the project, and Sanwekwe, an experienced tracker, helped her early work in Congo before insecurity forced the move to Rwanda. After poachers killed the silverback Digit at the end of 1977, she formed the Digit Fund to support anti-poaching patrols. Gorillas in the Mist followed in 1983.

What she observed

Her own October 1971 article in National Geographic acknowledges George Schaller’s earlier study and explains her aim of watching animals without provoking flight. The article follows named groups and individuals rather than a generic Gorilla. Fossey describes learning quiet, feeding-associated calls from two young orphans she nursed, Coco and Pucker, taking recordings to Cambridge, where she earned a doctorate, and mapping how group ranges changed.

Pen, paper and nose prints

Fossey worked with pen and paper, a manual typewriter and a camera, drawing maps, sketching each Gorilla’s nose print to tell individuals apart and typing up her field notes each night for her loose-leaf notebooks. The Fund calls those notebooks the beginning of one of the longest-running databases on any wild animal.

Three chapters

The designers, MASS, describe an exhibition that moves through Dian’s World, Gorillas and You and Modern Conservation. Scrims and photographs evoke the cabin, and interactive displays lead toward the people doing conservation now.

The cabin

The exhibit fabricator formula D_ describes a reconstruction of Fossey’s cabin, with a re-created projection system and some of her original furniture and belongings. Her passport and wristwatch lie in a timeline exhibit.

A skeleton at the dedication

At the dedication in June 2022, Tara Stoinski, the Fund’s President and CEO, showed visitors the skeleton of the silverback Cantsbee.

Digital Gorillas

Leonardo DiCaprio named the 360-degree theater for his mother, Irmelin. Habitat XR’s launch release of June 2022 names two films for it: A Day in the Life of Gorillas, produced with the Fund and following Gasizi in Pablo’s group, and Saving Mountain Gorillas: The Dian Fossey Legacy, from the National Geographic Society’s Impact Media Lab with Habitat XR. Virtual-reality kiosks and GorillAR, an augmented-reality trail led by a computer-generated silverback, carry the story out into the garden.

Why a long record matters

Elizabeth Williamson and Katie Fawcett’s research history explains the method: habituated Gorillas can be recognized, photographed, given nose-print records and followed through births, transfers and deaths. Because the same groups have been followed across generations, the Fund holds what it calls one of the most complete multigenerational family histories of any wild mammal. The Fund’s researchers have followed one maternal line through five generations, from a female Fossey first saw in 1967 to an infant born in 2024.

Some findings show only across decades. A 2025 study of two decades of records followed 56 females through 152 moves between groups and found that they prefer groups holding females they once lived with: old friends, kept across years apart. Tara Stoinski, a co-author, has said that a few years and a few groups would never have shown those ties at all.

Leadership and field continuity

In January 2012, Felix Ndagijimana became Karisoke’s first Rwandan director, after joining as a research assistant in 2004 and earning a master’s in primate conservation at Oxford Brookes in 2008. Ndagijimana now directs all of the Fund’s Rwanda programs.

Jonas Nubaha offers another kind of continuity. Fossey recruited him for her anti-poaching team in 1979, and he tracked Gorillas for four decades before retiring in 2019. His son, Marcel Habumugisha, became a Fund tracker in 2022.

A tracker whose work crossed borders

The University of Florida’s Bob Campbell exhibit identifies Sanwekwe as a tracker who worked with George Schaller in 1959, helped Fossey learn tracking and behavior and later worked at Karisoke. Fossey credited him with enabling her first Gorilla photographs, at Kabara in 1963.

From student to scientist

Deogratias Tuyisingize began as an intern in 2004 and became, the Fund says, the first Rwandan Ph.D. on its staff. James Munyawera met the Fund through its field courses as a University of Rwanda student, worked as a research assistant, won a fellowship at the University of Oxford and is now pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon on the Mountain Gorilla gut microbiome.

A thesis on the mountain

The Fund has hosted University of Rwanda students for senior thesis research since 2003. The Memoirs Program, run with the university, the Rwanda Development Board and Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, gives 10 to 12 top undergraduates a year a supervised research project, and a 2020 paper by Fund scientists found 83 percent of its participants working or studying in conservation. In December 2022 the program moved to the campus, where students now live and work on site.

Earlier still

Each August more than 100 students attend a two-week summer conservation camp on the campus, and visiting students record birds and butterflies for the Fund’s biodiversity researchers. Girls in Conservation, launched in 2023 and coordinated by Nadia Niyonizeye, supports girls from communities next to Volcanoes National Park through secondary school with workshops, mentoring and scholarships.

The trackers

The Fund gives daily, full protection to 10 Mountain Gorilla groups in Volcanoes National Park, which it estimates at about half of Rwanda’s Mountain Gorillas, working closely with the Rwanda Development Board. Jean Damascene Hategekimana, known as Fundi, began as a cook at Karisoke and had been with the Fund for 31 years by July 2025; as field operations coordinator he now manages the trackers’ schedules.

The people who kept it going

Writing in 2008, Elizabeth Williamson and Katie Fawcett credited the long-term dedication of Karisoke’s trackers, its anti-poaching patrols and Rwanda’s national parks office with much of the success of the research and with the Gorillas’ continued survival. Those are the people who carried the record through the hardest years of the country’s history.