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Deborah Lahey
President and Chief Executive Officer
As Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Deborah Lahey is responsible for all operations and key strategic initiatives to advance the Museum’s mission. Deborah supports the president's office in strengthening public support for the institution and personally championing the Museum’s collaborative efforts to help connect people of all ages to the world of nature and science.
Deborah brings more than 15 years of experience in diverse non-profit engagement, project management and all facets of design and planning. Previously Deborah held positions at CF Murphy, Perkins & Will and Chicago’s renowned Van Straaten Gallery. A respected civic leader, Deborah has been actively involved in fundraising at a leadership level through capital campaigns, individual donor development, events and grants for St. Ignatius College Prep, Loyola University Chicago, Loyola University Museum of Art and United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago.
A Chicago native and life-long resident, Deborah received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
Michael Bauman
Chief Financial Officer
As Chief Financial Officer of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Michael Bauman is responsible for all financial matters pertaining to the Museum, including directing and managing the Museum’s financial systems and operations, and overseeing the organizations operating budget. He is also responsible for the Museum’s administration, human resource and legal functions. Bauman has been with the Museum since June, 2005.
Bauman has years of experience in finance and accounting management. Prior to the Nature Museum, Bauman served as a Junior Controller at Kustom Seating Upholstery, Inc. Previously, he had been a Corporate Accountant at Pasquinelli Construction Co. and Financial Advisor at H & R Block Financial Advisors.
He received his bachelor’s degree in business and finance from Eastern Illinois University and his master’s degree in accounting and financial management from the Keller Graduate School of Management.
Alvaro Ramos
Vice President of Exhibitions and the Museum Experience
As the Vice President of Exhibitions and the Museum Experience, Ramos leads the team responsible for the vision and strategy to enrich the Nature Museum’s guest experiences, including developing and managing all exhibitions and public programs. Ramos previously held the position of Director of Exhibits in which he was responsible for conceptualizing, designing and managing all permanent and temporary exhibitions at the Nature Museum. In that role, he also oversaw the work of exhibit technicians, graphic designers and project installers as well as develops and implements enhancements to all exhibitions.
Since joining the Nature Museum in 2007 as the Manager of Exhibits and Design, Ramos’ major accomplishments include spearheading Lawn Nation: The Art and Science of the American Lawn, the Museum’s first-self curated exhibition, and showcasing the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ extensive collections out on the Museum floor through Birds of Chicago, a new permanent exhibition at the Museum.
Prior to working at the Nature Museum, Ramos served as a project manager position at 555 International. He also held an exhibit design position at the Adler Planetarium and was a production supervisor at the Chicago Historical Society. Additionally, Ramos spent several years as a freelance exhibit designer and consultant, completing projects for the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, among others.
Ramos received his Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rafael Rosa
Vice President of Education
Over the last 150 years, the Chicago Academy of Sciences has provided science education programs for teachers and students throughout the Chicago region. In the 1980s, the Academy began to expand the number and type of programs offered to the education community. Today, the institution’s education offerings range from quick refresher courses for teachers to semester-long, in-classroom training; field trip workshops; a teacher resource center; environmental studies and job training for teenagers; scout overnights; and facilitated public program demonstrations with live animals at the Notebaert Nature Museum.
Rafael Rosa was appointed Director of Education in 2006, overseeing programming and resources that reach 65,000 school children, 2,000 teachers, and hundreds of thousands of Museum visitors each year.
Rosa has been part of the Academy and Museum’s education team for 16 years in a variety of roles: he led the institution’s student and teacher programs, oversaw online learning, coordinated the Teenagers Exploring and Explaining Nature and Science (TEENS) program and the heralded Science on the Go! program, an in-classroom professional development program that has been correlated to improved test scores. Rosa also served as manager of the institution’s distance learning efforts in the 1990s and as a science outreach educator at the Museum.
He received a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and began his career in museum education at the Museum of Science and Industry where he developed and implemented public programs for three years. During his 18 years in the field, he has given dozens of presentations at National Science Teachers Association Conferences, the Association of Science and Technology Centers Conferences, and numerous regional and state conferences focused on environmental, technology and science education. He currently serves as Chair of the Museums in the Park Education Committee and is a member of the Chicago Wilderness Education Committee.
Douglas J. Taron, PhD
Curator of Biology, Vice President of Conservation and Research
Doug Taron has been at the Curator of Biology at Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum since the museum’s opening in 1999. Taron has been responsible for all living material in and on the grounds of the Museum—from the snakes that slither in the Istock Family Look-in Lab to the grass that grows in the prairie just outside its front door. He manages the 2,700 square-foot Judy Istock Butterfly Haven, the only permanent year-round exhibit of live butterflies in Illinois, and its 1,000 butterflies; oversees management of the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ collections; heads the institution’s insect conservation biology research; and represents the Museum as scientific expert to the print and broadcast media.
Taron has a particular fascination with butterflies, which started at age 6 when he received his first butterfly net in his home state of Massachusetts. When he migrated to Chicago in the early 1980’s for graduate school, he began helping to restore Bluff Spring Fen in Elgin as part of the Nature Conservancy’s Volunteer Stewardship Network. There, he shared leadership in managing a 95-acre Illinois State Nature Preserve in Cook County, Illinois, participating all aspects of land management including brush control, prescribed burning, seed collection, and exotic species control.
In 1989, Taron concurrently became Director of the Butterfly Monitoring Network, a volunteer-based organization monitoring the health of butterfly populations in nature preserves throughout Illinois. Under his leadership, the program grew from seven to 150 sites. He developed volunteer training, recruitment, and a database to support the program, which has been a model for similar projects in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa.
Taron joined the Chicago Academy of Sciences as an exhibit coordinator in 1997, developing content for the Judy Istock Butterfly Haven and Wilderness Walk exhibits and providing supplemental technical content for all other exhibits at the Museum. In 1999, the respected conservation biologist set up his work station at the Nature Museum, the teaching and learning center of the Academy. Since 2001, Taron has served as the primary investigator for the Museum’s Butterfly Restoration Project, which studies and restores endangered and threatened butterfly species to their native habitats. In 2008, Taron received the Chicago Wilderness Excellence in Conservation Award for his butterfly restoration work.
Taron previously worked in the biotechnology industry for 13 years developing DNA-based diagnostic tests for cancer, infectious disease and genetic disease. He has published 10 journal articles and abstracts in the field of biotechnology and authored two biotechnological patents.
Taron has a BA in Biology from Colby College in Waterville, Maine and a PhD from the Department of Biochemistry, and Cell Biology from Northwestern University in Chicago.
Taron’s published work in the field of conservation biology includes:
• Taron, D. 2006. A Comparison of Relative Abundance of Summer Monarch Butterflies in the Midwest with Winter Roosting Populations in Mexico. 2006 Invertebrates in Captivity Conference Proceedings.
• Taron, D. 2003. Bring them Back Alive: The Return of the Swamp Metalmark Butterfly to Illinois. 2003 Invertebrates in Captivity Conference Proceedings.
• Taron, D.J. and J. Dean 2001 Rearing Butterflies on Semi-Artificial Diets. 2001 Invertebrates in Captivity Conference Proceedings.
• Taron, D.J. 2000. The Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network: An Ongoing Volunteer- based Butterfly Census from Natural Areas in Illinois. Proceedings of the Invertebrates in Captivity Conference 2000.
• Taron, D.J. Insects. In The Tallgrass Restoration Handbook, S. Packard and C. Mutel, eds. Island Press (Washington), 1996 pp. 305-318.
• Taron, D.J. 1996. The Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network: A Program for Assessing Changes in Butterfly Abundance. Abstracts of the 1996 meeting of The Wildlife Society. | 
