Massaro: Physician's passion is public service

By Gary Massaro, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Dr. Ellen J. Mangione is moving up, but not on.

She'll be leaving her job as the No. 2 doctor at the Colorado Department of Health and Environment to become top doc - chief of staff in medical parlance - for eastern Colorado for the VA, which includes the Front Range and High Plains.

Medicine has been her career, public health her passion.

"I was raised to be in service to others," she said. "My father was a high school principal. My mother was a teacher as well."

Mangione grew up on a farm in upstate New York. The "J" isn't an affection, by the way. It stands for Jones, her maiden name.

She said she wanted to be a doctor from childhood on. Her father had diabetes as a child, and "was one of the original people in the world to be on insulin," she said.

He was initially treated at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, "which is where I went to med school," she said.

While at Columbia, she worked for the New York Department of Public Health. After she finished her medical training, she went to work for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

She likes to point out that as an epidemic intelligence service officer, the logo was a worn-out shoe sole, meaning she and her colleagues did a lot of their own legwork.

She went back to school - University of California at Berkeley - and earned her master's degree in public health in 1985, the same year she began working for the Colorado health department.

Here's some more public service for you. She's a volunteer on the faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

She's married. Her husband, Bill, is a doctor, too. They have three children.

When she and her husband aren't doing the medical stuff, they like to ride bikes.

"We have vacation bicycling trips," she said. "We discovered we could do it as a family."

They first tried Nova Scotia and other parts of Canada.

"We kind of ran out of land there," she said.

So they went west on their next trip - the San Juan Islands off Washington.

"Let me tell you, the San Juan Islands aren't flat," she said.

She enjoys skiing, too, but isn't too good at it.

"My husband thinks I'm a beginner longer than anybody else he knows," she said.

She'll start with the VA in December.

"I still have some things I need to finish at the health department," she said.

She said she made the right career choice.

"No two days are alike. And it's wonderful," she said. "I couldn't stand a job where I was just sitting behind a desk being bored."

When Gary Massaro listens, people talk. massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271