Julie Mangada is thinking back to when, and why, she joined a program at Petaluma's Casa Grande High School that helped her realize that science is alive and exciting and can do stunning things for wildlife and human beings.
"Gosh, that was a long time ago," said the 1989 Casa grad, not terribly amused that this summer she'll age out of the 30s. She signed up for the United Anglers of Casa Grande, she said, wrinkling her nose, "probably because there was a cute boy in it."
Soon enough, Mangada - her maiden name was Lambert - was president of United Anglers, her school's now internationally known creek restoration and hatchery program. She waded deep into its mission to restore southeast Petaluma's trashed Adobe Creek and deploy good science to bring back the runs of steelhead trout and Chinook salmon.
Twenty-plus years later, the divorced mom and former pizza-shop franchisee celebrates what and where she is now.
She has earned a Ph.D. in molecular medicine and become a post-doctoral research fellow at Novato's Buck Institute for Research on Aging. There she is exploring the use of stem cells and other innovations of biomedical science to prevent cancer and other diseases common to the elderly. She's also building an education outreach program.
An allied quest of Mangada, who lives in Santa Rosa with her 8-year-old son, Marlow, is giving back to United Anglers (uacg.org) and instilling Casa students and as many other young people as she can with the love of life-enhancing science.
"It's not this scary and horrible thing that you have to suffer through at school. It really means something," she told a group of Casa students she brought to the Buck Institute last fall for a three-day Science Boot Camp.
She's taking hands-on science into elementary and secondary schools, and she's laying plans for a new kindergarten-and-up teaching lab at the Marin County institute, America's only non-profit research facility dedicated to aging.
Mangada, a native of Petaluma, is happy to be home after living far from Sonoma County for most of two decades following high school and a stint at Santa Rosa Junior College. She first went north to Eureka and, with the help of investors, opened her own Domino's Pizza shop.
"On my 21st birthday I was sitting in an office going through profit-and-loss reports," she said. She decided she wanted instead to study science and perhaps become a veterinarian.
She moved east, enrolled at the University of New Hampshire and studied microbiology and genetics. A couple of factors diverted her from the veterinary track: She concluded she wouldn't care to treat cats, and she read that stem-cell transplants offered hope to people afflicted with the autoimmune disease Scleroderma, a condition that plagued her mother.
Mangada switched her focus to molecular medicine, earning her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2007.
Since she returned to the North Bay early in 2008 to begin her research at the Buck Institute (buckinstitute.org), she also has become a source of inspiration to her alma mater's United Anglers.
Its founder, Casa Grande teacher Tom Furrer, is on medical leave and is just home after knee replacement surgery.
"Julie has been given a tremendous gift of communication," Furrer said. "She can take the most complicated subject and teach it to fourth or fifth graders. We have videos of her giving talks in 1987, &‘88, &‘89 that are just amazing."
"I think that in Julie the Buck Institute has an ace in the hole that they're really going to take advantage of," he added.
Interim program adviser and hatchery director Dan Hubacker regards Mangada as a godsend.
"I can call or e-mail her and say, &‘What do you think about this?' If she doesn't know, she works with enough scientists that she can find the answer," Hubacker said.
He and Mangada share a determination to train Casa students how to take DNA fingerprints of the salmon they raise in their hatchery and catch in the Petaluma River and its tributaries to harvest their eggs.
"That is why they came to Boot Camp here," Mangada said at the hillside Buck Institute, "so they could begin thinking molecularly."
Hubacker is thrilled by the prospect of students in United Anglers contributing to the DNA database essential to the management of West Coast salmon.
"Find another place where you can find that," he said. "These kids are excited about it, too."
Katie Miller, a 16-year-old Casa Grande junior in her first year in United Anglers, said, "It would be great if they'd start that this year or next year, while I'm still in the program."
She said she has always loved science and math, but more so since her involvement in the Anglers and in Mangada's boot camp drove home the way principles learned in a lab can benefit the environment and the world.
"It's really cool to realize that everything we're doing could relate to science," Katie said.
Mangada has no doubt that genetic analysis is the next logical advancement for the school-based group that was born 27 years ago, revived Adobe Creek, raised more than $500,000 to build a hatchery and this year collected and fertilized about 27,000 salmon eggs.
"That's what I'm most proud of, when I see what the program has become," said the scientist who 22 years ago sought donations for something nobody had ever heard of, an on-campus fish hatchery.
She believes a kid turned on to practical science by United Anglers, by an outreach effort of the Buck Institute or by other hands-on opportunities can pick a path to a science career that can give life a hand.
"They can be an environmental crusader, or they can cure cancer," Mangada said.
She has done one of those things, and she's working on the other.
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