Michael Manga Inspires the Young in More Ways Than One

By Monica Friedlander

Even while discussing one of the most heartwarming emails he ever received, Michael Manga seems uneasy with the subject, looking down while nervously cracking a warm smile. For the professor of earth and planetary studies, the note from the mother of an 11-year-old boy in Chapmansboro, Tenn., was a touching gift that also spelled redemption. “It makes me feel better,” Manga says, “and makes the whole thing worth the grief.”

“The whole thing” has to do with Manga’s reluctant — almost pained — decision to be featured in People Magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive” issue last November. The unlikely heartthrob, now in his fifth year of teaching at U.C. Berkeley and a father of two, cares as much for the contents of People as most of the magazine’s readers do for Martian topography. But the touching e-mail Manga received from People reader Janet Burgart validated his decision to jump into the pop-culture fray. Her son Ray, Burgart said, had faced many challenges in life, and getting him excited about academics was never easy. All that changed when she stumbled onto this issue of People, in which Manga shared a page with rock star Bono of U2.

“I had to check out your story to see how a geology professor made this list," she wrote. “I took my son to your website and we looked at pictures of your lab and field work; we looked at your awards and course studies. Ray was really inspired and hooked on the whole scientist thing. He even broke into a discussion about his legos and hydromechanics. I think your story allowed him to remap something in his head about the gift you give yourself when you follow your interests.”

This was exactly the kind of outcome what Manga had hoped for when he agreed to become more famous for his exotic good looks — a gift of his mixed Indian, South African, German and Polish ethnic heritage — than for his award-winning scientific research and teaching achievements.

“The reason I didn’t say ‘no’ is that the people who read magazines like People are different from those who read science in the New York Times,” Manga said. “The chance to let these people know about science doesn’t come very often.”

Letting people know about science is what Manga does and loves best. Raised in Ottawa, Canada, he taught for five years at the University of Oregon before joining the faculty of UC Berkeley in 2001. His research in the field of geodynamics has won him prestigious awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius award.” But Manga is happiest working with students, helping them find their own paths and their own insights into such hot topics as the evolution of Mars and the causes of volcanic eruptions. Their success is his success, and Manga, in his characteristic understated way, claims none of the credit.

“Students and postdocs do everything. I don’t do anything,” says Manga, who often works 12 to 14 hours a day. “I’m happiest about how well my students have done. We’re training the next generation of academics and researchers. What UC has to contribute is the research enterprise, and most of the research being done here is done by students. Advisors may come up with a big idea. But the work, many of the ideas, and the enthusiasm come from students. And we have the best students here.”

  His students return the favor. It’s Manga’s example that inspires them, says Mark Wenzel, a graduate student who has worked for years with Manga studying the thermal evolution and topography of Mars.

“Michael doesn’t lecture students on good practices for researchers or teachers, but leads by example. He does things right and hopes that we will follow that,” Wenzel says. “He is not flashy or into self-promotion. He is modest and patient and leaves students to their own devices. His door is always open. He’s very much interested in his students’ best interest, which supersedes his.”

Mars in an aquarium

Manga’s training ground for up-and-coming earth scientists is his Geological Fluid Mechanics Lab in the basement of McCone Hall. There you will find a plethora of ingenious contraptions that range from hi-tech “model volcano,” whose “eruptions” are monitored by a high-speed camera clicking away at 2,000 frames a second, to a messy, dripping aquarium filled with corn syrup. The latter, Manga explains, is intended to simulate Mars. “The solid parts of planets behave like a fluid over long periods of time. We scale properties of the fluids to properties of the Earth. We can simulate the entire evolution of a planet over the period of one day.”

Sounds like fun? So it should, Manga says. “Science is fun,” he says. “That’s what drew me to it when I was a kid.” Growing up in Canada’s capital, Manga was blessed with having all the national museums within easy reach. One of them ran a club for kids, and young Michael would go there every week. His first incursions into science were in entomology, not geology. “In high school I spent summers sticking things in bugs,” he remembers.

It was in college, at McGill University in Montreal, that Manga shifted interests — first to physics (“I understood physics least well, so I thought I should become a physics major”) and eventually to geophysics. His studies focused on the process that created the Moon’s “dark spots” — big impact basins filled with lava flows.

“There are questions [in geology] that people can still answer, and it’s hard to come up with scientific questions that are still answerable,” Manga says. “My undergraduate advisor was really good at finding those. He knew what was doable. Having that kind of guidance is really important.”

Inspiring the young

Manga’s relationship with his students is synergetic. Soft-spoken and always understated, Manga is the first to admit he’s not a performer in the classroom. Yet he and his students feed on each other’s passion for learning.

“I’m not the most dynamic teacher, but I like teaching a lot,” Manga says, and quips half-seriously. “It’s for selfish reasons that I like teaching. It’s the only chance I get to force myself to really understand something very well. You explain these things to people who are learning something for the first time. I’m sure I learn a lot more than the students I teach.”

His students may disagree, but the result is a model working relationship between a researcher and his students, the kind of collaboration that helps advance Berkeley’s reputation as one the greatest research universities in the world.

As for Manga’s power to inspire the young, 11-year-old Ray Burgart’s story is testimony that there’s more than one way to trigger love of science in young people.

“We are currently on vacation in Florida,” said Janet Burgart two months after her original email to her favorite scientist, “and my son is excavating anything and everything he can from the sand. He certainly has Mr. Manga's adventurous spirit.”