We Love: Ellen V. Futter

If being female in the male-dominated world of natural science wasn’t accomplishment enough, being the president of New York’s famed American Museum of Natural History is an amazing achievement. And when you’ve held that job for more than 15 years, as Ellen V. Futter has done, you deserve huge kudos!

Futter’s professional life is chock-full of similarly impressive feats. At 31, she made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest ever president of a major college. Thirteen years later, having tripled the endowment of Barnard College (her alma mater), she made it fully residential for the first time, and vaulted the school into the pantheon of higher education. Among many other appointments, she has served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and on the boards of The Legal Aid Society and the American Association of Higher Education. But she’s best known for her work at the Museum. From helping it stage one of the first museum exhibits on global warming in the early 1990s, spearheading the vast expansion of the Hayden Planetarium, revamping the Museum’s legendary fossil halls, to renovating the iconic Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, Futter has turned the Museum into a global destination that has helped shape the imaginations of millions of kids (and grownups), as well as into an institution cemented into popular culture and entertainment. We tip our hat to Ellen Futter for making science so fun and accessible, and for paving the way so that young girls everywhere realize that they, too, can be a science goddess.