John Childs, The James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Director of Collections

John Childs joined PEM in 2016, coming from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, where he served as head of conservation services and was responsible for overseeing more than 10,000 artifacts.

Childs has exceptional experience in conservation, collection care, team management, historic preservation and grant writing. He leads PEM's Phillips Library and oversees the museum's registration, collection management and conservation functions. His appointment coincided with PEM's expansion of a new 120,000-square-foot Collection Center, which now provides unprecedented capacity for the study and care of the museum's collection of more than 850,000 objects.

A graduate of Yale University and the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, Childs has also been affiliated with a wide variety of projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. He has also been an adjunct assistant professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University. From 2006 to 2011, Childs served as conservator at Historic New England, where he managed the conservation department responsible for treating objects from 36 historic house museums and the associated study collection.