September 19, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
Job held by: Silva Raker
Why the job was created: To increase the amount of money the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, earns from business activities and to centralize responsibility for the ventures in an executive-level position.
Duties: Ms. Raker manages the museum’s current enterprises, which include its gift shop and online store, facilities rental, and Exhibit Services, a business that builds exhibits and conducts training workshops for museums around the world. She will also be in charge of developing new ventures. Income from the businesses accounts for $7.5-million of the Exploratorium’s $36-million budget.
Previous jobs: A trained scientist, Ms. Raker spent 10 years developing products and business partnerships at the Nature Company, a chain of retail stores with headquarters in Berkeley, Calif., which sold scientific toys, artwork, and other items and was sold to the Discovery Channel in 1996. More recently, she served as chief operating officer of Backroads, an adventure-travel company, also in Berkeley.
Education: Ms. Raker earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of California at Berkeley, followed by field studies in California and Cameroon.
Hobby: She’s an avid bird watcher, and on a trip to the Galapagos Islands with her family, she got to see finches like those that Charles Darwin studied while developing his theory of evolution.
