About Us
How We Started
Working in the Peace Corps on two different continents during two different decades, Jason Uitvlugt and Brad Lewis eventually crossed paths after landing teaching jobs at Bainbridge High School—located a ferry ride away from Seattle. Their shared interest in fieldwork and international studies brought the statistics teacher (Lewis) and environmental science teacher (Uitvlugt) together and drove them to explore opportunities beyond the classrooms they were teaching in. The two won a grant with Hilton Teacher Trek and visited a field site in South Africa where their disciplines were applied to leopard conservation. The trip inspired them to return to Africa with their students and develop a three-week field course at the site they originally visited.
Addressing Conservation Efforts and Global Climate Change Challenges Through Education
Lengau means “big cat” in Southern Sesotho, something Brad Lewis learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho during the 90s.
Lengau’s mission is threefold: to expose students to the natural and data sciences through hands-on experiences, to collect data on wild cats and primates, and to help preserve the Earth’s biodiversity.
Our efforts in data collection, analytics, and population estimates are rooted in better understanding the leopards of the Limpopo region of South Africa and the jaguars of the Madre de Dios region of Peru. Our current goals include establishing a research presence in both Borneo and Mongolia, where we hope to start studying the clouded leopard (Borneo) and the snow leopard (Mongolia).
Lengau serves as an educational non-profit out of Seattle, WA, while concurrently serving the Limpopo Province of South Africa, where the main Lengau Research Center is located.
As a qualified 501(c)(3) non-profit, the efforts of Lengau are exclusively for charitable and educational purposes. For that reason, all data collected on apex predators, primates, and the overall biodiversity of areas we study and conserve are shared as open-source data. This is done in hopes of striving towards our ultimate goal: to protect and conserve the natural world to which we all belong.
