Vernon Reynolds

In 2020, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Primatological Society (IPS). He was honored for his research, conservation contributions, and advancement of education toward non-human primates.

The focus of Reynolds's 2005 book, The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest: Ecology Behaviour and Conservation, is on his 15 years account on the Sonso chimpanzee community. The Sonso community is a group of fifty chimpanzees that resides in the Budongo Forest.

In 1999, Reynolds, Jane Goodall, and his research team published an extensive study on the cultural variation of chimpanzees. Their study expanded on some of the previously known chimpanzees' behavioral patterns. The study revealed 39 behavioral patterns that differed in various communities. Reynolds and his team observed that certain behaviors such as grooming, courtship, and tool use, were present in various chimpanzee communities but absent in others. The study described their cultural findings as drawing resemblance to human cultures, a feature that was once unapparent in other species.

In 1990, Reynolds founded the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS) in the Budongo Forest in Uganda. The purpose of the station is to conduct scientific research on primates, lead conservation efforts, and serve as a model for sustainable rainforest management.

Originally, the station was called the Budongo Forest Project when Reynolds studied and protected about 800 chimpanzees in the forest. In 1988, as Uganda faced a civil war, Reynolds read a news report from a major Ugandan newspaper concerning chimpanzee infants being smuggled as pets for wealthy individuals in Dubai. Motivated by the report, he spent the next year seeking funds to establish a base committed to research the chimpanzee population changes in the Budongo forest. After securing initial funding from the Jane Goodall Institute, Reynolds' crew was able to construct trails in the forest to gain better access with the chimpanzees.

He taught anthropology at the University of Bristol from 1966 to 1972, when he was appointed University Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He continued to teach at Oxford later becoming Professor and a Fellow of Magdalen College until his retirement in 2001. Today, he holds the title as Emeritus Professor.

Vernon Reynolds (born 14 December 1935) is a British biological anthropologist known for his research on chimpanzee behavior and as founder of the Budongo Conservation Field Station. He has been described as "...one of a trio of pioneers (Jane Goodall and Adriaan Kortlandt being the others) who founded field studies of chimpanzees in the 1960s."