Our Team
Our Team
Trace Lane
Founder & Director
Annie Zean Dunbar
Executive Board
Kathleen McMahan
Executive Board
Kat Hammond
Executive Board
Trace Lane is an interdisciplinary hydro-social climate scientist who studies relationships between water, people, and climate change with a focus on connecting different epistemologies and ontologies of knowledge. Trace holds a B.S. in psychology, an M.A. in political science and non-profit / public administration, and an M.S.W. - A.M. in social welfare policy, research, and administration from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration with a certification in Global Social Work. She is currently a doctoral candidate at East Carolina University in the Integrated Coastal Sciences PhD Program where her research is focused on bridging the knowledge held within surf communities of indigenous descent with conventional climate science in ways that disrupt colonial, gendered power dynamics through citizen science and citizen journalism. Trace has a long history of social justice research, activism, non-profit management, and program design. Trace's relationship with water began in unrecognized urban India, where she worked as a socio-legal water researcher on a landmark case for the Human Rights Commission of Maharashtra. She continued this relationship with water as a socio-political researcher for nature-based solutions to water contamination in informal floating communities on the Peruvian Amazon, then studying the identity of water from local perspectives in the Peruvian Amazon, highlands, and coastal areas. Trace fell in love with surfing on a deserted beach in Todos Santos, Baja, and never looked back. In 2019, she founded Surf Sisters for Science as a non-profit organization with the goal of empowering people who identify as womxm in surf, science, and climate justice. Trace's vision is recognition of, and ultimately protection of, culturally significant surf breaks as unique Places of ecological knowledge creation and surfers as knowledge holders. Trace is a longboard surfer.
Annie Zean Dunbar is a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work. Zean has a B.A. in Psychology and an AM from the University of Chicago Schoolof Social Service Administration with a program of study in Global Social Work. She is a researcher and artist. Zean has worked as a research consultant and assistant in higher education and private companies conducting mixed-methods research on healthcare administration, education, refugee resettlement and in the fields of Diversity and Inclusion and Forced Migration Studies. Her artist practice centers on community conceptions of truth and omission, grief and loss, the formation of identity and interstitial space, and examination of memory. Her most recent limited release collaborative publication titled |][\ (vertical bar : closed bracket : open bracket : backslash, 2018) explores themes of trauma and healing as part of the Chicago based Artist Recisenty with the Overlook Place. She is the Social Media Lead of the Emerging Scholars and Practitioner on Migration Issues (ESPMI) Network, a global network of junior scholars, practitioners, artists, activists reconceptualizing the field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Her scholarly research interests include mutual aid organizations and formalization of services, race and identity formation, trauma and reconciliation, secondary migration, and long-term refugee and (im)migrant resettlement in the United States. Learn about Zean’s work at her website: azdunbar.com.
Kathleen McMahan had a passion for environmental stewardship and action from a young age. Her parents cultivated a deep sense of stewardship for the earth's resources, as national parks were a regular destination on family vacations. During her four years at Berry College located in northwest Georgia, Kathleen held various leadership roles within Students Against Violating the Earth (SAVE), as well as volunteering her spare time to the Coosa River Basin Initiative (CRBI). Her educational background is in religious studies, with particular emphasis on American interpretations of Buddhism, the deep ecology movement, and the American Spiritualist movement of the late 19th century. She currently works as an executive assistant in higher education and is honored to apply her skills and knowledge in a meaningful way to the mission and initiatives of SS4S.
More info coming soon!
Chris Haynes
Director of Clean Lab:Peru
Chris Haynes Is a traveler and spiritual seeker whose adventures brought him to the Peruvian Amazon in search of healing through Ayahuasca. Upon his arrival he was shocked to see the plastic bottles and trash blanketing the shores of the Amazon River and its tributaries. One year after his first experience with Ayahuasca and its healing powers he returned to Iquitos, Peru, and co-founded La Luna Del Amazons (an Ayahuasca healing center). Chris is the director of The Clean Lab.
