New on the Job: Janet Harris, Chief Development Officer, California Academy of Sciences

Background: Ms. Harris, 55, who assumed her new role January 1, comes to the San Francisco organization after nine years as vice president of development at the International Rescue Committee, in New York, which serves refugees and displaced persons worldwide. Before that, she was a fund-raising and strategic-planning consultant for nonprofit groups, including many theaters.

Education: She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa in criminology and theater in 1975 and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Why she was hired: To help the organization navigate its current “transition” phase, says Gregory C. Farrington, the academy’s executive director. This past September, it wrapped up a successful, half-billion-dollar capital campaign; the previous September, it moved into a new $500-million facility in Golden Gate Park, a “green” structure designed by Renzo Piano. “The building is the stage,” Mr. Farrington says, “and now the focus is on the play. What can we do in the building? What can we do on the stage?”

Her agenda: Ms. Harris says she intends to help support the organization’s global-sustainability mission by raising more of its approximately $60-million annual budget from outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Salary: She declined to reveal it.

What she’ll miss most about New York: Theater. She most recently enjoyed Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, at Second Stage Theatre, and the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—which, she notes, were “both supported by private philanthropists.” —Heather Joslyn