Carnegie Science Center co-directors retiring
Having accomplished all the goals they helped map out in a strategic plan a decade ago, Carnegie Science Center co-directors Ron Baillie and Ann Metzger will retire by the end of the year, the science center said Monday.
The decision they reached on Thursday comes as no surprise, said Connie George, science center spokeswoman.
“They’ve been planning it for a while,” Ms. George said. “With completion of the 2020 strategic plan that they started over 10 years ago, momentum is rolling, and now both are going out with the completion of the PPG Science Pavilion and the capital campaign.”
The science center has named Jason Brown as interim director. He currently is the science center’s senior director of science and education. Mr. Brown will take his interim post when Ms. Metzger and Mr. Baillie retire.
Mr. Baillie, who has been with the science center in various positions for more than 30 years, plans to retire on Nov. 30. Ms. Metzger, who joined the science center in 2006 as director of marketing and community
affairs, will retire sometime in December, Ms. George said.
“They both worked together in tandem all through this strategic plan,” Ms. George said. “And everything they did as co-directors, they’ve worked on in tandem.
“So I think they decided together they were not going to start a new strategic plan that the new director would have to run.”
The process to begin a search for a permanent replacement as director, or directors, will not begin until the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh — the science center’s parent organization — selects a new president. Its former president, Jo Ellen Parker, left the post in February.
Whoever replaces Ms. Metzger and Mr. Baillie will have a high bar to reach.
In June, the $33 million pavilion opened, providing 48,000 additional square feet of educational and exhibit space to the 27-year-old science center building, and it ended its capital campaign, which had exceeded its goal amount of $34 million by $12 million and ended early.
Ms. Metzger and Mr. Baillie were named co-directors in 2009, an unusual move for a museum, but one that worked well for the science center.
Ms. Metzger said both of them have been asked many times over the past decade what it was like sharing such a post.
“I like to tell people that it’s a little like pairs skating,” she said. “You develop a mutual trust.”
That trust came easy between them, she said, “from the get-go.”
“Ron’s background was in education and mine was in marketing, and we decided early on that we were a team.”
Mr. Baillie’s career stretches back to when the organization had just become known as the Buhl Science Center, having decided to change the name from the Buhl Planetarium and begin expanding beyond its origins focused on astronomy.
The year he started his career, 1983, “really was the beginning of the new science center,” he said.
Helping to usher the science center from its origins as a planetarium into what it is today is his proudest accomplishment, he said.
“The whole notion of taking a vision and realizing it has been incredible,” he said, something that was capped by the creation of the pavilion and shoring up all of the science center’s programs.
So what are they planning to do in retirement?
“I’m going to spend more time with my husband. Sleep in for a while. And I’m going to try to relax,” Ms. Metzger said.
Mr. Baillie, whose wife just retired from her job as a high school math teacher, said with both of them retired, they want to take a vacation that’s “not restricted to summer.”
Ms. Metzger said she and Mr. Baillie feel now is “perfect timing” to retire with the opening of the pavilion and completion of the capital campaign.
“We feel like we’ve closed a chapter,” she said. “We’re very proud of our accomplishments and now we’ll turn it over to new leadership.”