Dr. Chevy Humphrey
President and CEO, Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
On any given day, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) boils with activity. Open-mouthed visitors walk gawking under giant airliners dangling from the ceiling. Children screech down the halls, tugging on slow grown-ups. Whistles hoot in the replica coal mine and the bells on model trains ping as miniature engines race across a model of the American west from Chicago to Seattle the size of a playing field.
But not long ago the museum stood silent, still. In bleak January 2021, Chevy Humphrey arrived in Chicago to become the seventh president and CEO of MSI. COVID-19 cases were surging again throughout Cook County as hospitals scrambled to get the new vaccine. MSI had closed its doors, and no one was saying exactly when they’d reopen.
In one of North America’s biggest playgrounds, Chevy Humphrey was home alone.
“I had to figure out how to meet people,” she recalls. How do you breathe life back into one of Chicago’s cultural icons, which had lost $20 million in revenue and laid off scores of employees during the pandemic? “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get on Zoom,’” she said. “I had over a thousand meetings my first year.”
Hard work, but Chevy is used to making her own luck. The daughter of a Houston policeman and a piano teacher, she was seven when her mother sat her down for a talk. “You’ve got two strikes against you before you start,” she told her daughter. “You’re Black and you’re a girl. So, here’s the thing: You need to perform at 200% always so that you can have 100% in your back pocket.”
Chevy listened. It was already dawning on her that life wasn’t fair. Growing up in Houston’s Third Ward, Chevy’s parents spent every dollar they could spare on busing her to parochial schools in better parts of town. Education was the ticket out, they believed: Chevy’s father had given up his dream of medical school so that he could pay for his baby sister and niece to go to college. It bugged Chevy that she was learning things in school that her neighborhood friends weren’t. Her answer: Hold class in her garage every afternoon to share what she’d learned that day. It was, she thought, a way to pay it forward.
Chevy has been working to close the gap ever since.
While in college, she went to work for the Houston Symphony. The CEO of the symphony used to pass by her desk on his way to the boardroom for meetings. Beforehand, he’d stop to ask Chevy for her projections on attendance and revenues for the weekend ahead. He knew she’d know. Then he’d share Chevy’s numbers in his meeting.
One day she stopped him on his way out. “You always take the information I give you and tell the board what I just said. Does that mean I could do what you do?” she asked. “You could,” he answered. “Keep doing a good job and understanding the business; one day you could be a CEO.” That was it: Chevy set her sights then and there on becoming the leader of a nonprofit.
There were lessons still to learn. She took jobs as a fundraiser at the University of Houston and The University of Texas at Austin. She married young, had a daughter, and got divorced. Then she had a chance to move to Phoenix as Director of Development for the Phoenix Symphony.
“Don’t go,” said her parents. “Who do you know in Phoenix? No one. You’re a single mother.”
“If I were a man, you wouldn’t tell me not to go,” she replied. So, she packed up her household and her six-year-old daughter and moved to Arizona, knowing only the person who’d hired her.
In Phoenix, she started putting down roots. She also began her lifelong practice of collecting mentors and mentees. After three years at the Phoenix Symphony, she jumped to the Arizona Science Center where her job was to help get the organization back on strong financial footing. In her first interview, the CEO asked her, “Where do see yourself in five years?” Chevy replied, “Respectfully, in your job.”
“Well then, if you can help me, I’ll train you,” the woman answered. “We shook hands on it,” Chevy remembers. “And she was an incredible mentor who supported me throughout my professional growth.” Seven years later, Chevy was the new President and CEO of the Arizona Science Center.
She made good on her commitment to strengthen the center. On Chevy’s watch, assets grew from $3 million to over $42 million, revenues more than doubled, and programming expanded. She also stepped up as a leader outside the museum, joining the Board of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, which serves more than 500 science centers in more than 50 countries. At her first meeting, she took off her jacket before going to get food. As she went by, a man at one of the tables handed her his plate, assuming that Chevy was serving staff. She paused, thought about what to do, and decided to calmly handle the plate as if she actually were serving staff. But 12 years later, when the association honored her with their first Award for Service after she’d served over a decade as Board Chair, she stepped to the podium, and—instead of delivering the acceptance speech they expected—shared that story of her first association meeting with thousands listening.
“I told them, ‘This must never happen again. We all deserve to be seen for who we really are.’ It was the first time I’d said anything about it,” says Chevy. “You could have heard a pin drop.”
She kept on building community, finding mentors, and being a mentor. She served on the boards of the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute, College Success Arizona, and the American Alliance of Museums. She was named a Visionary Leader by the Women’s National Basketball Association and a Compass Visionary Leader by the Black Business Ventures Association. In 2014, Arizona Business Magazine named Chevy to its list of “Fifty Most Influential Women.” The Phoenix Business Journal called Chevy its Mentor of the Year in 2017 as well as one of its “Most Admired CEOs” in 2011. In 2020, the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce honored Chevy with their Athena Award, which recognizes women for excellence in professional leadership, community service, and mentorship. She spent 26 years excelling in the city that her parents were concerned about her moving to because she was a single mother without family around to help and support her.
And then Chicago came calling.
The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry is one of the largest science museums in the Western Hemisphere. Founded in 1933, nearly 1.5 million visitors pass through its doors every year. When the museum re-opened its doors in March 2021, Chevy had spent her first weeks and months interviewing everyone she could about what the museum did well and what it needed to do better. As a result, a new focus of the museum is growing science and technical education for women and girls. “Our Women in STEM program is about getting young women engaged, but it’s also about connecting them with role models and people in the field that look like them,” says Chevy. “I want to give more girls role models. Because if you can see it, you can be it.”
She tells a story about being interviewed when she first arrived in Chicago. “The reporter said, “Aren’t you lucky? You’re the first woman and the first Black American to run the Museum of Science and Industry. You are so lucky.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Chevy could see MSI’s marketing director cringing. “Well,” Chevy replied, “You know what? They hired a 20-year-plus veteran with a strong track record and global experience and a knowledge base of knowing how science museums run. I actually think they’re lucky to have me.”