Meet the On Campus Leaders

2009 Monterey Bay B On Campus Leaders, left to right:
Kim McCabe, Brianna McCoy Chapman, Peter Robbins, David Hanson

Photography

Peter Robbins. Kenyon College, B.A. Pete majored in Chinese Language and minored in Religious Studies at Kenyon, where he also took numerous courses in film and digital photography. His interest in Mandarin brought him to Middlebury for the Middlebury College Summer Language School intensive Chinese program, and to Beijing and Hangzhou where he studied abroad at the CET and Middlebury programs. After leaving Hangzhou, Pete backpacked through rural parts of China in Guangxi, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces, taking photographs, living with farmers, and learning about their way of life. His landscapes and portraits of life in rural China have been featured in several exhibitions at his alma mater, Kenyon College. In 2007 Pete worked as a journalist and photographer for a Chinese language newspaper in Portland, Oregon, and in 2008 he taught Chinese language in Putney Student Travel’s Excel China program. In his spare time he enjoys hiking, skiing, sailing, playing frisbee, and experimenting with odd films, filters, and homemade cameras. Among other things, Pete constructs and sells his very own pinhole camera kits.

Photography

David Hanson. Washington and Lee University, B.A. David is a Seattle-based freelance writer, photographer, and multi-media artist. He majored in English and Geology at Washington and Lee and spent a semester abroad in Santiago, Chile. He led a Putney Student Travel community service program in Costa Rica and a bike tour from Paris to Barcelona. David worked as a field instructor at the Voyageur Outward Bound School in Ely, Minnesota. As a field-science instructor at the Yosemite National Institutes he led students on science-based adventures in Yosemite National Park and Olympic National Park. For four years, David was Features Editor for Cottage Living Magazine, where, in addition to writing and editing, he directed photo shoots on locations around the country. He was co-founder of the Center Street Photography Project in Birmingham, Alabama, a middle-school photography workshop. The project won city-wide education awards in 2006 and 2007. He and brother Michael Hanson (NGSE Peru expedition leader) have traveled to Ecuador, Chile, Ethiopia, and around the US to produce a series of independent visual stories using photography, audio interviews, and video content to illustrate the global sources of products such as oil, gold, oysters, chicken, timber, and coffee. He also works as a teaching artist in photography for Seattle's Arts Corps.

Marine Biology
Brianna McCoy Chapman. University of California, Berkeley. B.A.; B.S. Brianna received simultaneous degrees in Integrative Biology and Conservation & Resource Studies at Berkeley. She was an undergraduate instructor in a marine mammals course and a volunteer at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where she dissected and prepared reptile skeletons. Brianna completed a Wildland Studies field course in Big Sur, California, where she conducted an otter census and a steelhead stream survey. She participated in a semester-long field project in fall 2008 on the island of Mo’orea, French Polynesia, where she completed a research project on Himantura fai, the pink whipray. Brianna is a certified SCUBA diver and has been diving in Polynesia, the Mexican Caribbean, and Australia. She is passionate about marine biology and is intimately familiar with the ecology and resources of the Monterey coast.

Marine Biology

Kimberly McCabe. Connecticut College. B.S. Kim graduated cum laude from Connecticut, where she majored in Biological Sciences. She participated in the Sea Semester program based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she researched population dynamics and ecological relationships within the Atlantic Ocean’s Sargassum seaweed ecosystem. She spent a summer as an ordinary seaman on the U.S. Brig Niagara, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and another summer as a deckhand on the Ocean Classroom Foundation’s vessel, the Harvey Gamage. In the fall of 2007 Kim returned to the Ocean Classroom Foundation, where she spent three semesters teaching marine science, leading hiking and snorkeling expeditions, and chaperoning and managing students as a marine educator. Kim worked on an organic coffee farm in Costa Rica and taught snowboarding at the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado. She is an active member of the Pembroke Watershed Association, helping to preserve and restore the ponds near her hometown in Massachusetts. Next fall Kim will return to the Ocean Classroom Foundation as head educator and science educator for the foundation’s semester at sea program.