Our Crew
WMC Staff and Personnel
Audrey Brown, Programs Manager
Audrey joined the WMC in Summer 2025 as an Operations Intern and now serves as the Programs Manager. In this role, she plans and coordinates the WMC’s summer programming, helping ensure meaningful, well-run experiences for participants, staff, volunteers, and community members alike. She also supports the daily functioning of our off-grid McCarthy campus. In addition to programs operations, Audrey assists with external organizational communications, social media and website development.
Moving forwards, Audrey is excited to continue supporting the WMC’s long-standing programs while helping expand new offerings to reach broader audiences. She is passionate about expanding access to equitable education through hands-on learning, mentorship, and community-building initiatives rooted in connection to the natural world.
Having recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ireland—and spending a year living in Korea as part of her studies—Audrey is passionate about immersing herself in and learning from different communities. In her free time you can find her reading, going for a dip in the swimming hole, and going for hikes.
Tamara Egans Harper
Administrative Assistant
Tamara joined the WMC in 2012 as coordinator of events at the Kennecott Recreation Hall, which WMC manages. She's worked for WMC since then, assisting with various administrative tasks, including maintaining the WMC’s database of donors, keeping track of all of our wonderful supporters and partners.
Tamara and her husband have lived in McCarthy since 2003 and she enjoys gardening, birdwatching, skiing, biking, hiking, cooking and welcoming guests to her tinycabin bed and breakfast during the summers.
Joey Boots-Ebenfield Program Coordinator, Field Studies Program
McCarthy rests beside a receding glacier, and as the climate of northern regions continues to warm rapidly, the wider Copper River Basin faces growing erosion, thawing permafrost, increasing wildfires, and vegetation community shifts that are implicated in the changing ranges and numbers of animals like caribou that have long been crucial to culture, landscape structure, and customary and traditional resource use. In this landscape change is always occuring, as can be learned from listening to these places and the people who call them home. Ecological, geophysical, glacial, and social processes have been interplaying here at incredible timescales, forming a system much greater and more complex than the sum of its parts. I focus on the roles that living organisms play in broader stories of change in landscape structure/process. Climate, people, policy, vegetation, and wildlife are all bound together in stories of ecosystem change. The Wrangells are a fascinating region to experience and learn from, and I’m excited to do so alongside our students this summer.
Kristin Link /
AIR Program Coordinator,
Field Studies Program Instructor,
Instructor for Field Sketching and Journaling Workshop and Community Group
Kristin Link is a fine artist, science illustrator, and educator who lives on the Nizina River just outside McCarthy. She works with the WMC as an instructor and facilitates the Meg Hunt Artist Residency Program. She has worked with the WMC in various capacities since 2010, including stints as Program Associate and as Executive Director. You can learn more about Kristin’s work on her website: www.KristinIllustration.com.
Ben Shaine
Field Studies Academic Coordinator
Ben has taught with the Wrangell Mountains Center’s college programs since their inception and provides a link for the Center with the academic community. His novel Alaska Dragon (Fireweed Press 1991), set in the Wrangell Mountains, explores the contemporary significance of wildness. He co-authored the Center’s Community and Copper in a Wild Land, an overview of the McCarthy area published in cooperation with the National Park Service. During congressional consideration of legislation designating Alaska parklands, Ben handled Wrangell-St. Elias issues for the Alaska Coalition. His master’s thesis evaluated management alternatives for the Wrangells and his PhD is in environmental studies. Ben and his family developed their homestead on the mountainside near Kennecott, where he lives, writes, wanders and wonders about the power of the Wrangells revealed in its details.
benshaine@gmail.com
George Wening, Field Studies Program Fellow
George first came to the Wrangells as a student with Wrangell Mountain Field Studies in 2024, and instantly fell in love with the Wrangell Mountains and its people. He’s returning for his second year working with the Wrangell Mountains Center, assisting with running the Field Studies program.
He’s a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota where he’s studying Geology and Physics with a focus on ice, snow, and glacier physics. He’s worked as a guide in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, all across the northern Midwest, and the Wrangells. He teaches and coaches rock climbing, and loves sharing his passion for outdoor sports with people, especially with people with limited access. He also loves learning new art forms - recently, he’s been making stained glass art, and playing guitar and fiddle.
A Peek back at WMC Staff and Friends
Video by Dave Sarbell