The Toulouse Metropolis announced Monday June 8 the appointment of Judith Pargamin as director of the Museum of Natural History and Ethnology of the Pink City. She succeeds paleontologist Francis Duranthon (65), who joined the museum in 1982.
A graduate of ENS Lyon in Earth Sciences and author of a doctoral thesis in planetology at the University of Nantes, Judith Pargamin joined the National Heritage Institute in 2007. She took her first position as head of collections at the Lille Natural History Museum the following year, before officially taking the reins of the establishment in 2010.
From 2020, she is leading a major renovation project at the Lille museum for which she obtained a budget initially planned at 22 million euros. The Gosselet wing was inaugurated in 2021 following a first phase of work intended for its restoration. The second phase, which provided for the expansion and modernization of the museum spaces, was launched in 2024 and was originally due to be completed in 2026. The project, however, fell behind schedule, leading to a budget increase of more than 50% and the postponement of the inauguration of the new building until 2028.
Judith Pargamin leaves the project she initiated midway through to begin another under the Occitan sun. His new employer in Toulouse has entrusted him with the design of a new scientific and cultural project (PSC) to be presented by 2028, the year of reopening of his counterpart in the North, whose management is provisionally ensured by the collections manager Laurent Bruchet.
Created in 1865, the museum of the Toulouse metropolis inaugurated a building in 2008, with its famous curved glass gallery. The second largest museum in France after that of Paris, it has a space of more than 6,000 m2 located in the Jardin des Plantes. Its permanent exhibition exhibits a small part of a collection made up of more than 2.5 million pieces and specimens. With more than 300,000 visitors in 2025, the Toulouse Natural History Museum is an important player in the city’s cultural offering.
As Éric Jean-François, metropolitan advisor responsible for scientific culture, points out, Judith Pargamin is arriving “at the best time”while the establishment is on the rise. It proved its attractiveness during the European Night of Museums organized on May 23, by increasing its attendance rate by 116%. With this appointment, the Métropole de Toulouse hopes to promote scientific culture even more vividly, by raising awareness of it among as many people as possible. An ambition shared by the new director, who makes it her duty to“support all citizens, whatever their age and origin, to address complex social issues”.
