Dr. Mencl has been practicing and teaching emergency medicine and prehospital care for almost 30 years. A graduate of Case Western Reserve (BA), Cleveland State (MS), and NEOMED (MD), He completed his residency in EM at Akron City Hospital (Summa Health System) where he stayed on as faculty, eventually becoming the system EMS Medical Director and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at NEOMED. In this leadership position, he assisted the hospital in acquiring and maintaining a variety of certifications and accreditations including level 1 trauma center, STEMI and chest pain, as well as stroke center. In his EMS capacity he served as medical director to the paramedic training program, started and ran an EMS fellowship and an EMS medical student rotation.

Currently Dr. Mencl is working for Penn State in Hershey Pennsylvania where he is responsible for the hospital-based ambulance and critical care service (Life Lion) which includes 2 helicopters. He is the EMS fellowship Director and a teaching attending in the EM residency there.

Dr. Mencl’s passions include teaching and research and he is a veteran of a number of University at Sea cruise conferences. He lectures nationally and internationally, and is on the editorial board of Prehospital Emergency Care. He has translated research into practice using some of his published work to develop best practices for his EMS agencies and helped Summa’s STEMI program achieve significant savings in time-to-intervention. From 2004-2006, Dr. Mencl took a sabbatical to serve as the program director of a new EM residency at the OLVG hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, thus gaining additional insight into different health care systems. He also participates regularly in the Rally Rejviz an international EMS/Ambulance competition held in the Czech Republic that attracts participants from around the world.