Chase Davenport, Founder
Chase Davenport is a teacher, researcher, builder and lover of San Francisco's Ocean Beach.
Chase began his career as a Teach for America Kindergarten teacher in Richmond, California. His interest in human intelligence led him to PhD studies in Human Development at UC Berkeley. Chase quickly merged his interested in human intelligence with machine intelligence and spent seven years as an Artificial Intelligence researcher on the Sustainable Technologies team at Accenture. But Chase is rarely ever doing one thing; during his years as a doctoral student and AI researcher, he was also designing and building surfboards that required less dependence on petroleum products.
Over time, Chase found his personal and professional interests converging on coastal dynamics. His formal education in Coastal Science and Policy allows him to understand coastal systems and his diverse experiences as a teacher, researcher, and builder allow him to make connections between those systems. Chase believes that coastal climate issues are inherently interdisciplinary and created the Ocean Beach Institute to build bridges between climate efforts at the border of land and sea.
Zack Cohen, Research and Outreach
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Zack Cohen spent his early years exploring Northern California’s beaches, where he became entranced by the Pacific Ocean.
Zack’s passion for the ocean is matched by his passion for science. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2017 with a degree in Molecular Environmental Biology, Zack built a math and science tutoring business to help the next generation of students better understand the natural world. To further his own understanding of the complex issues facing coastal ecosystems, Zack completed his Master’s of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island in 2024, where he focused on the effects of El Niño winters on communities throughout the Pacific Basin.
In pursuit of new coastlines to explore, Zack has spent much of the last eight years traveling in Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand, Micronesia, Ireland, and Nicaragua. These travels have given Zack diverse perspectives on how different communities interact with the ocean, and inspired his desire to help protect coastal communities in the face of climate change. Zack joined the Ocean Beach Institute to better understand and protect critical coastal ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
