Francine Patterson
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Dr. Francine "Penny" Patterson (b. February 13, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois) is a researcher who claims to have taught a modified form of American Sign Language to a gorilla named Koko.
She is the second oldest of seven children, and daughter of C.H. Patterson, a professor of psychology. She and her family moved to Edina, Minnesota when she was young, and then to Urbana, Illinois.
Her mother died of cancer when Penny was a freshman in college, and the youngest of her siblings was just five years old. This triggered her interest in developmental psychology.
She earned her bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1970. She earned her Ph.D. in 1979 from Stanford University, with her dissertation Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla on teaching sign language to Koko and another gorilla named Michael, who died in 2000.
Currently she serves as the President and Research Director of The Gorilla Foundation, which was founded with her long time research colleague Dr. Ronald Cohn in 1978 using monetary support from a Rolex Award. The Gorilla Foundation is trying to move from its current home in Woodside, California to a more a tropical habitat in Maui, Hawaii.
She is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, is a member of the Board of Consultants at the Center for Cross Cultural Communication in Washington, D.C., and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Gorilla journal.
She is the author of The Education of Koko, and has collaborated on the children's books Koko's Kitten, Koko-Love!: Conversations With a Signing Gorilla, and Koko's Story.
Patterson and her work with Koko are the subject of Barbet Schroeder's 1977 feature-length documentary Koko: A Talking Gorilla.
