New York’s Metropolitan Museum has tapped Haverford College president Daniel Weiss to be the museum’s president.

He takes over for Emily Rafferty, who signs off at the end of this month after a decade in the job and nearly 40 years at the museum (see Met President Emily Rafferty Retiring). Weiss will finish off the current semester at Haverford and begin the new job this summer.

The president acts as the museum’s chief operating officer, reporting to director Thomas Campbell while running day-to-day operations and overseeing 1,500 of the institution’s 2,200 employees. Weiss will preside over the museum as it assumes tenancy of the Whitney Museum’s Upper East Side building, opening a year from now (see Met Announces First Show in Whitney’s Breuer Building) and undertakes a much-needed overhaul of its modern and contemporary galleries (see Gut Renovation for the Met’s Modern and Contemporary Wing).

Weiss, a native of Newark, New Jersey, studied art history at George Washington University and received an MA in the subject from Johns Hopkins. He earned an MBA at Yale and an art history PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1992, focusing on Western medieval and Byzantine art with a minor in classical Greek art and architecture. He remained at Johns Hopkins for a decade, starting as an assistant professor and ultimately serving as dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

He went on to serve as president and professor of art history at Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College from 2005 to 2013, when he moved to Haverford College, outside of Philadelphia.

Weiss has authored two books:  Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Morgan Crusader Bible (Faksimile Verlag Luzern, 1999). His essays have appeared in Art Medievale, The Art Bulletin, and Jewish Art.