Washington, DC – The National Park Service (NPS) today announced the selection of Ronald C. Wilson as Chief Curator to lead the Park Museum Management Program. The Park Museum Management Program is one of five park cultural resources programs that provide national program support functions for park resources and advises the Associate Director for Cultural Resources in Washington, DC, on related policy. As Chief Curator, Mr. Wilson will provide national leadership for development and coordination of service-wide plans, policies, standards, and procedures for managing National Park Service museum collections. He will also have responsibility for overseeing technical assistance, publications and professional development pertaining to park museum collections, and the maintenance of a service-wide catalog and other statistics on the National Park Service’s more than 123 million museum items. Mr. Wilson will begin his new position on May 11, 2008.

Ron Wilson has been head of the Department of Interior’s Museum Program since 1991. In that capacity he has led museum program strategic planning efforts in ten Interior bureaus and offices and developed agency-wide museum training programs. He worked for NPS from 1991-1996, during which time the Interior Museum Program was housed within the NPS museum program. Prior to that he held management positions in several public and university museums in the southeast, midwest, and mid-Atlantic states. A strong generalist with over 30 years of professional museum experience, he holds a B.S. in Zoology and a M.S. degree in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, both from the University of Kentucky. A national leader in museum management, he brings to the park museum management program a wealth of experience successfully building and managing a large, complex program.

“We are very pleased that Ron Wilson is returning to the Washington, D.C. office of the National Park Service,” said Janet Snyder Matthews, Associate Director, Cultural Resources. “We look forward to working with him to strengthen stewardship and access to park museum resources.”

Mr. Wilson’s formal association with the National Park Service began while he was in college at the University of Kentucky. He joined Cave Research Foundation projects in Mammoth Cave National Park, where he participated in projects involving cave archeology, biology, and Pleistocene vertebrate paleontology. He later served as president of the Foundation, coordinating Foundation research programs at Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, Sequoia-Kings Canyon, and Lava Beds.