NEW YORK.- Debra A. McDowell, who has served as Chief Human Resources Officer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since April 2001, has been elected by the Board of Trustees as the Museum’s Vice President for Human Resources, effective with the new fiscal year that begins today. She becomes the first human resources officer to hold that title in the Museum’s history.

In her five years at the Metropolitan, Ms. McDowell has overseen all aspects of the Museum’s human resources initiatives and activities, focusing her department’s efforts on the areas of professional training, personnel retention and advancement, and widening and diversifying the scope of the Museum’s professional recruitment efforts. She advises senior management on staff development, diversity, compensation and benefits, and serves as the Museum’s principal executive representative with its unions and its benefit providers. The Metropolitan Museum has more than 2,500 full- and part-time employees.

Commented Emily K. Rafferty, President of the Metropolitan Museum: “Debra McDowell’s five years of service have been characterized by a rare combination of professionalism and humanity, earning her the respect and admiration of the entire staff-from our dedicated guards and maintainers, to our curators and educators, to our executive leadership. Her devotion to the institution, and her remarkable people skills, have helped raise the human resources efforts of the Metropolitan to an entirely new level. The Trustees, the Director, and I are all enormously pleased to recognize her accomplishments and to ask her to take her department to even greater heights.”

Before coming to the Metropolitan, Ms. McDowell served for six years as the Director of Human Resources for the Brooklyn Public Library, and before that, from 1979 to 1994, as a labor relations specialist, then as Deputy Director, and finally as Director, of the Office of Labor Relations and Collective Bargaining for the District of Columbia Government in Washington.

She is a magna cum laude graduate of Bowie State College in Bowie, Maryland, and earned her law degree from Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. Ms. McDowell resides in Manhattan.