People have not always been happy to see Ryan McCammon when he showed up to work.

As a public health sanitarian for the Ledge Light Health District, the regional health department for nine local towns, McCammon often would arrive at the scenes of health code violations, disputes between neighbors or vermin infestations, usually with orders for a homeowner to fix something on their property.

"There's a lot of, 'This is my property and I should be able to do what I want,'" McCammon said.

McCammon, originally from the Midwest, has always handled those situations gracefully, Ledge Light Director of Health Stephen Mansfield said.

"It does take a special kind of person that can do the regulatory tasks that are required by law, but make sure the interaction with those people is ... positive," Mansfield said. "Some people are very good at it — and Ryan just is one of those people."

More than a decade with Ledge Light and 18 years working in public health departments have given McCammon a chance to see behind the scenes of the health of the region's residents, the implications of building real estate in coastal areas and what happens when rats congregate in a residential neighborhood.

This month he will start work in a new environment: a classroom at the Interdistrict School for Arts and Communication in New London, where he will be teaching physics to eighth-graders.

McCammon started his career as a biology major at the University of Northern Iowa and as an intern at Disney's Epcot theme park in Florida, giving tours and taking care of the shrimp, alligators and eels in the aquaculture exhibit there.

He followed Renee Brouillette, a fellow Epcot intern whom he later would marry, to Connecticut and got his first job with a mosquito control and lawn service company here, working with local health departments to fight back against Lyme disease and West Nile Virus. That led to a job with the Westport Weston Health District in 2000, where McCammon got a crash course in the nuts and bolts of public health, conducting food inspections and responding to health code complaints. He later worked at the Colchester health department and the Chatham Health District.

That was a time in which the role of public health in civic life was expanding, he said, partly as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks and spreading fear about threats like anthrax and bioterrorism.

"We dealt with vermin and that kind of thing, too, but over the years one thing that's changed ... is public health is so much bigger than it was back then," he said. "That's when public health expanded, at least initially."

Now health departments are responsible for teaching people about asthma, encouraging education about the risks of drug use and responding to the opioid addiction crisis.

In 2004 he started work as a sanitarian with Ledge Light Health District, which at that time only represented Groton, Ledyard and Waterford.

Since then, the district has added six towns to the area where its sanitarians conduct health inspections and respond to complaints — Lyme was the most recent, in May. At Ledge Light, McCammon has gone beyond his inspection duties, Mansfield said, developing food safety education programs and initiating efforts to use GIS systems to map various health data and resources in the towns that are part of the district.

He used the GIS system to display health patterns in three Groton neighborhoods, showing the health disparity among socio-economic demographics in each area.

"I kind of became the GIS person," McCammon said.

And most of that time he still was working in the field, responding to disputes between neighbors, overseeing sewer inspections and, last summer, assuring people in Pawcatuck that the rat infestation that began at a home on Milan Terrace was being addressed but also was a symptom of the natural population of rats that likely would not ever go away.

Throughout his career, McCammon said, he always enjoyed opportunities to teach people something new.

"I kept finding myself being drawn to things like outreach to people, and health education, and helping develop programs for food safety trainings ... and then making it a point to make sure all our staff were trained," he said.

So almost four years ago, he began taking teaching courses and planning to move out of the health department and into the classroom. He'll teach his first science class at ISAAC this fall.

"The fact that he decided to be a teacher, it's laudable," Mansfield said. "To a lot of people, I think it would be a scary prospect. For Ryan it just seemed like a challenge ... to do something that he's always wanted to do."

McCammon's departure gave Ledge Light an opportunity to restructure the department. His position as its environmental health supervisor won't be filled; instead, one Ledge Light employee will oversee the sanitarians and environmental health enforcement at regulated facilities — like restaurants, day care centers and hair salons — and another will oversee sewage and land use regulations.

And McCammon will get a new start, standing in front of a class of eighth-graders instead of restaurant managers but still full of enthusiasm for science education. His first lessons will be introductory physics concepts, a subject he says he likes because it encourages interaction in the classroom. 

There are certain parts of science that don't lend themselves to interaction as much, he said. "Motion ... is not a hard one to find a way. Literally, if you're just sitting at your desk, it's like, are you moving? You are. Thirty kilometers per second."

m.shanahan@theday.com