Meet the Team

Megan Haas comes from a family of explorers and innovators whose ideas and actions have shaped her own. Growing up, she was immersed in several world-wide communities with strong social, cultural and creative values, and as a result has modeled her life and work around both developing healthy community and learning from it.

At age fifteen, as a serious gymnast, Megan was diagnosed with sudden onset scoliosis. A seven-pound, fourteen-inch, stainless steel rod was attached to her spine, giving her gravity, and allowing her to grow and develop healthily. The intention and inquiry that drives Megan as a person and in business reflects a similar theme: How do we harness the firm, unyielding, and solid part of something, with strength, flexibility, and an intuitive, gentle intelligence?

In the last 25 years, Megan has spent time developing original companies that allow creative relationship-building to collaborate with high standards in business.

Megan’s motivation to develop an original global self-health community and social sanctuary has taken shape over the past 12 years. Kinnected is based on the need for a healthy online culture where people can establish new and healthy narratives, recognize what it means to flourish, and to authentically connect and collaborate.

Melissa has worked in the graphic design and user experience field for 27 years. She has strong roots in print and environmental design, but for the last 20 years, most of her creative work has focused on interactive design.

Since 1992, she and her wife have owned and operated a boutique consulting company providing outsourced IT, branding, and communications services for countless small, medium, and large businesses. This has given her the opportunity to design unique complex visual and interactive solutions. Some of these include: a series of learning kiosks and websites for the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, a personalized interactive Diabetes Advisor app developed for GlaxoSmithKline, a membership-based video and discussion support group site for the parents of transgender kids, a remote learning system for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, as well as numerous mobile and desktop websites and apps. She is particularly invested in designing systems of communication for non-profits and socially-conscious small business owners.

Melissa’s lifeime of experience with migraines and chronic back pain gives her a sense of urgency when it comes to Kinnected. She offers what she’s learned to others, in the hopes that they may find it helpful.

When not managing a housing co-op in Seattle or spending time with her family, Melissa loves reading about history, writing, hiking in the woods, spending time with animals of all kinds, and making remix music videos.

Madhu SinghMadhu is in her element working side by side with CEOs and businesses crafting legal solutions that fit the needs, vision and values of today’s growing companies. She is particularly interested in the emerging intersections of technology, new media and business law and enjoys helping companies navigate the front lines of these fast-developing areas.

Madhu holds a number of community positions that allow her to share her knowledge and passion with others. Madhu is Adjunct Faculty Lead at the Community Development and Entrepreneurship Clinic at Seattle University School of Business and School of Law and President of the Women’s Business Exchange.

Seeking to make a positive impact in our community, Madhu also spends her time speaking at CLEs for attorneys, advising at micro-enterprise clinics, providing pro-bono services for nonprofits, serving on nonprofit boards and hosting free seminars for local businesses on business topics including contracts, intellectual property and social media.

When she’s not busy working, teaching, blogging and networking, Madhu is a mother of two and enjoys time with her family and makes time to enjoy the diverse sights, sounds and tastes the Seattle area has to offer.

Dwayne first got started in his Engineering career as a young child when he discovered—to his parents' consternation—that the family telephone is great fun to take apart. That grew into a love of all things hardware and software, especially from the aspect of finding where the all problems lie.

Currently, Dwayne has 20 years of software and hardware QA/test engineering experience, and has tested everything from children's television software to pharmaceutical dispensing machinery for various companies around the Puget Sound area. He also has a Certificate in Web Development from Seattle Central College, where he graduated with High Honors. He finds that that programming knowledge has made him a much better tester—he can both look at the UI, and read the code behind the site, to find all the problems possible.

As the Senior Software QA Tester, his goal is to find the issues and bugs before the customer does, as well as ensuring that the customer has a smooth and pleasant experience using the site. His interest in working with a medical/wellness community site comes from developing the rare hereditary disease Spastic Paraparesis in adulthood.

When not finding all the bugs, Dwayne is a massive foodie—he loves to cook, eat, read about, and discover the foods of various cuisines. Currently, he is on a massive homemade ramen kick! He also loves hiking—despite the forearm crutches, going to concerts, playing the trumpet badly, and is an amateur radio operator, with the callsign N7YYZ.

Evelyn began working with computers at an early age. While enrolled in the University of South Florida’s computer engineering program, she was a campus representative for Commodore Computers U.S.A.

Evelyn founded The Logical Alternative in 1992 and began her career as a consultant, network engineer, and developer. Areas of expertise include the Microsoft .NET and Linux LAMP development environments, high availability secure network design, business process analysis, and ERP systems.

As the former Chief Information Officer of billion-dollar retailer Lazydays RV, she also has considerable experience in professional IT project management.

Recent projects include development of a build-your-own Avatar viral social media project for Microsoft for the Rio 2016 Olympic games, a dealership inventory management system for the automotive industry, unique web-based presentation technology, a dynamic survey and reporting system for the National School Climate Center, a custom time-tracking system for a staffing company, content-managed web sites for a number of small to medium businesses, and a complete affiliate web-based business solution for the funeral industry.

Evelyn’s favorite past-times include cooking vegetarian and vegan food, practicing yoga, dancing to live music, and playing a mean game of pool.

Kate Haas learned the nuts and bolts of copy editing at The New England Journal of Medicine in Boston, where her job involved tracking down every article referenced in the Journal to ensure that each citation was error-free. Kate traces her interest in health matters to those hours wandering the basement stacks of Harvard’s Countway Medical Library, poring over obscure medical journals.

Later, as a Peace Corps volunteer working at a school for the blind in Morocco, Kate witnessed directly the impact of access to healthcare. That was also where she learned Arabic, a skill she continues to use in her volunteer work with refugees.

Since 2006, Kate has been a Creative Nonfiction editor at Literary Mama, helping writers craft stories that compel and captivate. Developmental editing is her wheelhouse and intellectual delight.

A freelance writer, Kate’s personal essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, Slate, Salon, and other venues.

Natalie has always sought to find a way to make a difference by applying technology to important problems. She has been lucky to have had a chance to work in bioinformatics at the Institue for Systems Biology, where she helped to support a software toolkit which helped to enable the burgeoning field of proteomics in the Aebersold Lab. She also helped lead a collaboration between the ISB and Google during the initial phase of Cancer Genomics Cloud project, which was intended to store and process sequence and other biological data in a cloud computing environment. This was the one of the first NIH-approved cloud projects which was certified to store and process human genetic sequence data.

More recently, Natalie was extremely honored to take part in data management for the global HIV/AIDS clinical vaccine research networks as a part of SCHARP at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

With over a decade of on-the-ground experience at large and small organizations, Annie has not only cultivated a broad base of revenue generation and writing skills, but a strategic, empathetic approach to tackling the unique issues social good organizations and companies face.

As a fundraising consultant, she uses the breadth of her experience to empower organizations and companies to reach their revenue goals, which in turn enables them to provide crucial mission-driven services to the community. In addition to Kinnected, Annie is proud to partner with Whim W’Him Seattle Contemporary Dance, The Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas, and Village Theatre in helping deliver their missions.

Annie is also a recording artist, actor, and opera singer, most recently performing the role of "Gilda" in Seattle Opera's tour of The Three Feathers. As an artist, Annie has studied and witnessed the power of the mind-body connection and specifically how a sense of community can contribute to a positive overall health picture.

In her free time Annie is also an avid explorer and nature lover, hiking and backpacking the stunning trails in Washington state and preparing for loftier mountaineering goals in the future.

Riah has worked for more than 11 years in healthcare and administration, as well as leadership. Riah has seen first-hand the differences that access to adequate healthcare and related information can make. Fluent in both English and Spanish, Riah has volunteered for years in healthcare clinics so that patients can properly communicate their symptoms and healthcare providers can prescribe appropriate care.

As Outreach Coordinator, Riah hopes to equalize the healthcare playing field by literally taking the tools of Kinnected to the public here, in the US and globally. From interacting with her local community members in transitional housing to track their health; to being part of a global campaign to connect our friends and neighbors across borders through technology.

When not wrangling three girls and running her own business, Riah can be found in her community making people smile whenever possible.