Chevy Humphrey champions scientific thinking as Chicago museum expands futurescience mission

Chevy Humphrey has made experimentation part of the management culture at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, where she has served as president and chief executive since January 2021. As the first woman and the first African American to lead the museum, Humphrey oversees guest experience, exhibits, education programming, community engagement and financial sustainability, putting the scientific method at the center of how the institution thinks about its own future.

That approach matters at a museum with deep civic roots. The institution opened on June 19, 1933, inside a restored building from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, an origin story tied to Julius Rosenwald, who was inspired to create the museum after seeing an interactive display on a family vacation nearly a century ago. The museum describes itself as one of the largest science centers in the Western Hemisphere, and its challenge now is to keep that legacy relevant to a public that increasingly wants institutions to do more than display artifacts.

Under Humphrey, the museum has leaned into that mission with new programming and ambitious capital projects. A centerpiece is the 007 Science exhibition, produced with EON Productions and framed by Humphrey as a meeting point of science fiction and science fact. The museum has also been reshaped by Ken Griffin’s $125 million gift, the largest in its history, which led to the renaming of the institution as the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and is supporting new exhibits, the Henry Crown Space Center renovation and an exhibit about the human body.

The museum’s future plans also now reach back to its past. In 2025, it announced a $10 million renovation intended to reopen access to its original south entry from Jackson Park, linking the building more directly to its 1893 World’s Fair origins and to neighborhood redevelopment around the Obama Presidential Center. The project signals a broader strategy: treat the museum not just as a destination, but as a civic institution embedded in the life of the city.

That effort has been matched by fundraising and public-facing events meant to widen its base of support. The 45th annual Columbian Ball drew more than 500 supporters and raised $1.5 million in 2025, while the annual Black Creativity Gala continues to honor Black creators, innovators and artists working across science, technology, engineering, arts and math. In a moment when cultural institutions are under pressure to prove their relevance, Humphrey’s museum is betting that scientific thinking can still be made tangible, useful and public.