King's College - Biology Department

Faculty Profile in Pride Winter 09

Dr. Brian Mangan

Passionate about wildlife conservation and the community’s natural heritage, environmental science and biology professor Dr. Brian Mangan has devoted his life to making a positive impact on the local environment and his students.

Brian grew up in the Mountain Top area enjoying many forms of outdoor recreation. As an environmental consultant for Ichthyological Associates, Inc., and Ecology III, Inc., he has spent his entire adult life studying and monitoring the Susquehanna River, including more than 1,000 hours in scuba gear collecting many of the organisms he studied.

Over that period of time, Brian says, “I became convinced that the Susquehanna River is a tremendous natural resource for our area and beyond.”

After nearly two decades in consulting, Brian felt it was time to take a different approach to the environmental field. He thought teaching would be the best way to transfer his passion for the environment to others. After testing the teaching waters as an adjunct faculty at a local university, he was hired in 2000 to direct the Environmental Studies Program at King’s. Mangan was charged with the responsibility of expanding both the enrollment and curriculum of the program.

“My academic training (which includes bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from Penn State University and a master’s from Bloomsburg University) prepared me for what I needed to do in the classroom and curriculum, but my experience in the field enabled me to greatly enrich the program and better prepare our students for the daily rigors of this field,” said Mangan.

As a result of Mangan’s efforts and with the great help of many faculty in related departments, King’s currently offers two environmental majors and a minor, and many courses across the environmental spectrum in science, policy, ethics, law, and art. While presently the program has particular strengths in ecology and wildlife science, Mangan hopes to continue building curricular strengths from other areas of this broad field.

Throughout his tenure at King’s, another of Mangan’s goals has been to raise public awareness about the plight of the Susquehanna River. As a result, he founded The Susquehanna River Institute for the purpose of changing negative perceptions of the river through education and research. Currently, the Institute offers five summer graduate courses for area teachers on the river (north and west branch versions), energy and the environment, the Chesapeake Bay, and Pennsylvania wildlife.

As an associate professor of environmental science/biology, Mangan likes to teach his students outside traditional classroom lectures and labs. He particularly enjoys taking his students into the field to study the ecology of Pennsylvania’s waterways. Recently he created two week-long immersion courses in which he takes students to the Chesapeake Bay and Adirondack Park to study the ecological dimensions of both of these important ecosystems.

The hands-on experience has paid dividends for his students, considering many have presented their findings at both national and regional conferences, and have been employed in similar outdoor settings.

“While I hope that my lectures provide very good information for students, I know that even the best lectures are greatly improved when students participate in research and activities that apply the principles and concepts they learned about in the classroom.”

Even after 25 years, Brian has yet to tire of exploring and researching the ecology of the river. This past summer, he worked with several students on the distribution, diversity, and habitat associated with crayfish. They even invented their own crayfish trap for this purpose.

During the fall semester he worked with students to profile the recent invasion of zebra mussels to the river near Great Bend. And beginning in 2009, in conjunction with the Susquehanna River Heartland Coalition for Environmental Studies, a group of area colleges and non-governmental organizations, he will launch a study of mercury contamination of organisms within the Susquehanna Watershed, while expanding his crayfish work into the west branch of the Susquehanna.

Mangan’s family is no stranger to King’s. Three of his children have attended or are attending the College. His daughter, Tara, graduated from King’s in 2006 with a major in psychology and minors in neuroscience and biology. She recently married and is finishing a master’s degree in clinical psychology.

His daughter, Leah, graduated in 2008, majoring in environmental science with minors in biology and geography. She recently began a master’s degree in biology. And his daughter, Kaitlin, is in her second year at King’s and is considering a major in marketing. Another Mangan remains, his son, Thomas, but it is too early yet to tell if he will follow his sibling’s footsteps to King’s. Brian and his wife, Joy, reside in Nescopeck.