The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced yesterday that Maxwell (Mike) Hearn ’71 has been chosen as the next Douglas Dillon Curator in Charge of the Department of Asian Art.

James Watt, the current chairman of the department, retires this June.

“Mike has long played a major role in the department,” Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Campbell said in a press release.

In addition to overseeing numerous art collection and exhibition expansion projects over the years, Hearn has given graduate and undergraduate seminars on Chinese paintings at Yale, Princeton, Columbia and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

Hearn was an art history major at Yale and has served in his current position as the Met’s curator for chinese painting and calligraphy since 2005. Hearn started at the Met in 1971.