Peter Hubert Klopfer (August 9, 1930 – June 5, 2026) was a German-born American zoologist, civil rights advocate and educator. He was Professor Emeritus of Biology at Duke University, where in 1966 he co-founded, with John Buettner-Janusch, the Duke Lemur Center (formerly Duke Primate Center). This facility houses the largest living collection of endangered primates in the world.
Klopfer was an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1963) and the Animal Behavior Society (1968). In 1979–80 he received the Humboldt Research Award for his achievements in the field of Sensory and Behavioral Biology.
As a scientist Klopfer authored, co-authored or edited twenty-five volumes and more than 125 peer-reviewed articles, most in the field of animal behavior. Among other contributions, Klopfer's research helped to establish the link between oxytocin and maternal attachment behavior and to initiate study of neural processes involved in hibernation among primates.
As a civil rights advocate Klopfer was jailed in 1964 for protesting segregated restaurant facilities in Orange County, North Carolina, including Watts Restaurant and Grill. He subsequently became the plaintiff in the 1967 United States Supreme Court case, Klopfer v. North Carolina, which upheld that the Speedy Trial Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to individual states in the same way as it does to the federal government.
As an educator Klopfer and his wife, Martha Smith Klopfer, were among the Quakers who founded Carolina Friends School in 1962. CFS was one of the first schools in the modern South that welcomed children of all races.
Life and career
Early life and education Peter Hubert Klopfer was born on August 9, 1930, the elder of two sons born to German immigrant parents, Hubert Robert Klopfer (1900–1937) and Edith Brauer (1896–1977). Shortly after the end of World War I, Hubert Klopfer studied economics at Columbia University. There, in the 1940s (and later at UCLA), his brother, Bruno Klopfer, taught psychology and popularized use in the U. S. of the Rorschach test.
He was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Abington Friends School. When his father became ill with Hodgkin lymphoma, young Peter lived for several years with Alice and Thomas Knight, Hicksite Quaker elders in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, who were close friends of his father. Late in 1937, after Hubert Klopfer's death, the brothers and their mother settled in southern California. Edith Brauer supported her family by taking in boarders, chiefly older German women with connections to the film industry.
As a teenager Klopfer attended Windsor Mountain School, an international boarding school in Lenox, Massachusetts, before matriculating at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he earned a B.A. (with honors) in Biology in 1952. Here Klopfer was especially inspired by the "personal but unassuming" pedagogical style and "wide-ranging studies" of George A. Bartholomew. While an undergraduate at UCLA Klopfer's Quaker convictions led him to refuse conscription for military service during the Korean War. Returning his draft card resulted in a prison sentence; however, Judge Leon Yankwich, then Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, released Klopfer on probation, on condition that he "obey all laws, State and Federal, so far as…conscience allows." Klopfer proceeded to join a technical assistance training program (forerunner of the Peace Corps) that was based at Haverford College.
At Haverford Klopfer came to know the herpetologist, Emmett Reid Dunn, who advanced the rigor of the young scientist's interest in animal behavior. While at Haverford Klopfer also discovered the work of Niko Tinbergen, in particular Tinbergen's 1952 paper, "Derived Activities: Their Causation, Biological Significance, Origin, and Emancipation during Evolution". Around the same time Klopfer became acquainted with the work of Eckhard Hess and his associate, A.O. Ramsay. Ramsay, who was both a researcher and a high school science teacher, offered a vocational model that Klopfer briefly followed (1952–53) when he returned to his former high school, Windsor Mountain School, as a science teacher.
Through volunteering at an American Friends Service Committee weekend work camp in Claremont, California, Peter Klopfer became acquainted with Martha Smith. Friendship grew into engagement, and they married in 1955. Through more than six decades the couple collaborated in many ways: as researchers, as founders of Carolina Friends School, as active members of Durham Monthly Meeting of Friends (NC) and board members of other Quaker organizations, as Masters runners, as equestrians, and as participants in Ride and Tie competitions. Peter and Martha Klopfer had three daughters and four grandchildren. Since 1958 the Klopfers made their home in North Carolina, residing nearly all that time in Orange County, on land that now accommodates Carolina Friends School, located 5 miles from the Duke Lemur Center and 6 miles from Duke University's Biological Sciences Building.
Klopfer did his Ph.D. work at the Osborn Memorial Labs of Yale University, drawn there by the recommendation of George Bartholomew and the charisma of G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Frank A. Beach. Here Klopfer came to know a variety of faculty members and guest lecturers, including J.P. Trinkaus, Dillon Ripley, Don Griffin, José Delgado, Konrad Lorenz and Margaret Mead. His cohort of graduate students at Yale included Malcolm S. Gordon, Alan J. Kohn, Daniel A. Livingstone, Robert H. MacArthur, and Jane Van Zandt Brower. Klopfer's Ph.D. thesis studied imprinting in waterfowl; however, his interest in maternal attachment in goats also dates to these years.
After a brief stint as head of the science department at Windsor Mountain School (1956), Klopfer's next stop in his formation as a scientist was a year (1957–58) as a postdoctoral fellow at W.H. Thorpe's Madingley Field Station for Animal Behaviour in Cambridge, England. In addition to Thorpe, Klopfer associated at Cambridge with Robert Hinde, Thelma Rowell, Malcolm Gordon, and Stephen Wainwright. Klopfer and Wainwright later became longtime colleagues at Duke University.
Academic career Klopfer's career in higher education began in 1958, when he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Duke University's Department of Zoology. Apart from four Visiting Professor positions in German and Israeli universities, Klopfer has spent his entire career at Duke University. He attained the rank of Associate Professor in 1963 and Professor in 1967. He was Professor Emeritus of Biology.
He held a variety of professional offices at Duke, including service on the Undergraduate Faculty Council (1959–64; 1988–89), the Neurosciences Curriculum Committee (1965–66), the Animal Care Committee (1966–68), the Academic Council (1967–71), and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (1997–2018). He was Duke's representative to the Board of Directors for the Organization for Tropical Studies (1967–82), Secretary of Duke's American Association of University Professors chapter (1967–69), and Director of its Field Station for Animal Behavior Studies (1968–73).
An additional arena of Klopfer's service to Duke University was as its women's track coach, before Title IX (1972), when the team was a club (but did compete in ACC cross country meets). Klopfer was trained for this work by Duke's legendary and long-serving track coach, Al Buehler. Buehler also inspired Klopfer himself to become a Master's runner, a pursuit that he and his wife, Martha Klopfer, participated in for decades. In the 1970s Peter and Martha Klopfer were among the founding members of the Carolina Godiva Track Club.
In addition to his election to the AAAS, the Animal Behavior Society, and his Humboldt Award, other fellowships, awards, and honors Klopfer has received include a U.S. Public Health Service Special Postdoctoral Fellowship (1964), a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (1965–70), the Duke University Student Association's "Outstanding Professor" Award (1968), and the "Distinguished Service Award" of the Cook Society, Duke University Office on Institutional Equity (2009). Klopfer was also named a "Distinguished Professor" by the UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund) in 1985–86.
During his academic career Klopfer held a variety of editorial positions with academic journals, including as associate editor, Journal of Experimental Zoology (1970–76), Editorial Advisor, Springer Verlag (1970–1990), and co-editor of the Plenum Press series, Perspectives in Ethology (1970–1990). Klopfer served as an editorial board member for The American Naturalist (1972–76) and the International Journal of Comparative Psychology (1995–2000).
Klopfer traveled widely as an academic research scientist. He was a Visiting Professor in Israel at Tel Aviv University (1970) and Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1987), and in Germany at the universities of Tübingen (1979–80) and Potsdam (1992). In Budapest, Hungary, he gave the Inaugural Lectures at Bolyai College of Eötvös Loránd University (1995).
Lemurs, both in Madagascar and at the Duke Lemur Center, were a focus of Klopfer's research. A personal interview with Klopfer in August 2020 yielded the following list of previous animals and habitat locations he studied: ducks in Manitoba; ducks and passerine birds in England; elephant seals in California; antelope in Israel, Jordan and Egypt; fish in Germany and Belize; horses on the Outer Banks of North Carolina; goats and giant tortoises on Aldabra; birds in Costa Rica, Panama, Guatemala, Jamaica, Cayman Brac and Puerto Rico; birds, ducks, goats and lemurs in North Carolina.
Activism and advocacy Klopfer compiled a life-long record of activism and advocacy with respect to civil liberties and civil rights. That record was rooted in his membership in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which dated to his youth and is briefly discussed above. It continued with the American Friends Service Committee, on whose Southwestern Region Executive Committee Klopfer served (1967–74; 2003–10). Perhaps the fullest manifestation of Peter (and Martha) Klopfer's Quaker commitments is the founding of Carolina Friends School (CFS) as a racially integrated school. The couple were not only founding and sustaining board members of CFS; they taught at it, raised funds for it, donated the land for it, sent their three daughters to it, and have provided continuous servant leadership to it for six decades.
While a young professor at Duke, Klopfer chose to take an active role in the civil rights movement that swept across the American South from 1954–1968. Indeed, just days after arriving in Durham, North Carolina (from Cambridge, England, in 1958), Peter and Martha Klopfer behaved, at a segregated laundromat, in a manner that confounded both its black and its white patrons. They put their dark-colored laundry in machines designated "colored" and their light-colored laundry in ones designated "white."