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The new deputy mayor overseeing the New York City health department and related agencies is a veteran health professional and hospital executive with strong community ties and very much a product of Queens, where she and her family immigrated from Ecuador.
Helen Arteaga Landaverde, 49, comes to the job at Health and Human Services after five years as the CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens that was at the “epicenter of the epicenter” in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a refrigerated truck stored bodies, and overwhelmed doctors and nurses rationed ventilators.
Arteaga Landaverde herself was a Covid-19 patient at Elmhurst, treated only a few weeks into the outbreak. Years before, her father had been treated for leukemia at Elmhurst. His death helped shape her worldview.
“You see, here is where my advocacy was born. It is here where my dad died without having … insurance. It was here that I survived Covid,” Arteaga Landaverde said at the Elmhurst news conference on Dec. 30 when Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced her appointment. Her voice catching with emotion, she looked up from the lectern and into the crowd. “And it’s here that I want to say, ‘Madre, tu sacrificio valió la pena.’”
Mom, your sacrifice was worth it.
Arteaga Landaverde steps into the new mayor’s administration with challenging responsibilities at a chaotic time for public health. In addition to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, she will lead the departments of Social Services, Aging, Veterans’ Services, Youth and Children’s Services, NYC Health + Hospitals, and Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She succeeds Suzanne Miles-Gustave, who was named to the post in March 2025 following an exodus at City Hall tied to the U.S. Department of Justice asking a court to drop federal corruption charges against then-Mayor Eric Adams.
Federal funding cuts, primarily from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will have a profound impact on the health and well-being of New Yorkers from all five boroughs. The changes include cuts of $10 trillion over 10 years to Medicaid, the source of health coverage for almost half the city’s population, and the Affordable Care Act.
On Monday, the Trump administration froze $10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services, and cash support for low-income families in Democratic-run states, including New York. The suspension of such funding will surely complicate Mamdani’s efforts of realizing his affordability agenda, which consists of introducing free child care.
How Mamdani and Arteaga Landaverde plan to protect the health of New Yorkers is not yet clear. During the campaign and his transition, and since his Jan. 1 inauguration, Mamdani has said little about his health policies. Arteaga Landaverde, too, has offered few details.
“To every New Yorker that trusts us enough to show up, and to those that are suffering in silence wherever you are because they do not know if government will protect them or treat them with dignity, I promise you today that I will work so hard to ensure that you are seen and that we are thinking big and courageous about solutions that will allow you to thrive in the city that we love,” Arteaga Landaverde said at the Elmhurst press conference. “You see, I see you. ’Cause your struggles are mine. I am who I am, because of them.”
Arteaga Landaverde did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed.
One of her first tasks will be picking a permanent health department commissioner. Dr. Michelle Morse has been serving in an acting capacity since October 2024, her limbo status a source of constant speculation. She applied for the permanent job with the Mamdani administration via an online portal and has conveyed her interest in staying on through allies. (Morse is on the board of directors for NYC Health + Hospitals.)
In a statement Thursday, Morse said she looked forward to Arteaga Landaverde’s leadership. The two had met in 2021 — Morse as the inaugural chief medical officer and deputy health commissioner, Arteaga Landaverde as the Elmhurst CEO — just after officials had announced Covid-19 vaccination mandates for health care workers.
“Dr. Arteaga personally met with every employee who had initially refused vaccination. She heard their concerns at all hours of the day and night, and it was thanks to her leadership that vaccine uptake increased. That story has long stayed with me as an example of her grace, compassion, and deep understanding of public health.”
A father’s lesson: ‘How can I help my neighbor?’
Born in the United States and raised in Ecuador, Arteaga Landaverde returned to Corona, Queens, as a girl with her parents and sisters. With a full scholarship at New York University, she studied chemistry because she saw so many of her neighbors die of AIDS and wanted to find a cure. To that end, she had enrolled in medical school but withdrew following the death of her father.
She later earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University and a PhD in community health and health policy from CUNY. Her dissertation explored flu vaccine hesitancy among Hispanic adults in the United States. The loss of her father offered an epiphany of sorts: The quality of health care in Hispanic neighborhoods wasn’t the same as in other neighborhoods, and she felt compelled to change that.
“He used to tell me, ‘My daughter, you can’t change the world, but you can change this block, this house,’” she recounted in a 2022 Spanish-language interview with Fox 5 New York. “That stayed with me. He said, ‘I can’t fix the whole world, but how can I help my neighbor?’”
In 2009, she co-founded Plaza Del Sol Family Health Center in Corona, Queens, a federally qualified health center that brought to the community rare specialty care like mental health services, gynecology, family planning, mammography screening, breast imaging, optometry, and nutrition guidance. Patients found a family center where staff spoke Spanish. Arteaga Landaverde fought hard to secure a mammogram machine.
“This would have happened only because of Helen and her innovation,” Matthew Kusher, a family doctor who is the center’s clinical director, told Healthbeat. “Her ingenuity, her insight was able to force this health center to continue to grow and to thrive and to be as it is today.”
Queens was especially hard hit in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak, and center records show that the novel virus was circulating in the borough in late 2019, Kusher said. But by March 2020, the facility and others nearby became inundated with patients, many of them belonging to large families living in close quarters and unable to practice social distancing.
That spring, Arteaga Landaverde caught Covid from her son, Kusher said, and sought treatment in the emergency room at Elmhurst, which had become synonymous with the horror of the outbreak: Doctors and nurses were forced to ration ventilators. A refrigerated truck parked outside held bodies of those who had died. In just one 24-hour period, at least 13 patients died of Covid at the hospital.
It took a few months for Arteaga Landaverde to recover and return full time to work, Kusher said. By February 2021, she received a job offer she couldn’t pass up: CEO of Elmhurst. She became the first Latina to lead the hospital’s executive team. Competition was stiff: According to an NBC interview with her in 2024, she had 21 interviews for the job, and there were 300 applicants.
“I was actually surprised when she told me that she became the CEO of Elmhurst, because she doesn’t have that hard-driving vibe, and I think that’s what makes her special,” said Chris Palmedo, a clinical professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy who served as her dissertation adviser.
Elmhurst experience key to Mamdani appointment
Three years later, in May 2023, Elmhurst became the target of a rare strike. Galvanized by tough working conditions during the pandemic, some 165 trainee doctors belonging to the Committee of Interns and Residents-SEIU went on strike to air their grievances of being paid less than their counterparts on the other side of the East River, in Manhattan. It was the first physician strike at a hospital in New York City in more than 30 years.
While the doctors worked at Elmhurst, part of the public Health + Hospitals system, their residency program was run by Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in Manhattan. The strikers delivered a letter to Arteaga Landaverde hoping that the CEO would come to the bargaining table and use her influence to help avoid a walkout.
After three days, the strike ended. A tentative agreement included wage increases of 18% over three years, a $2,000 ratification bonus, and an enforceable agreement to negotiate on hazard pay.
Central to her selection as deputy mayor, Mamdani said, was her experience growing up in Queens and running the borough hospital.
“It was the kind of leadership Elmhurst residents came to expect from a daughter of the community – someone who grew up like them, cared about people like them, and understood New Yorkers with less are often treated with less,” Mamdani said as Arteaga Landaverde looked on. “That leadership, driven by empathy and guided by an unshakable belief that every New Yorker deserves a life of dignity, is no less than what the people of this city will expect from their new deputy mayor.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Arteaga Landaverde was the first Latina to lead Elmhurst’s executive team.
Trenton Daniel is a reporter covering public health in New York for Healthbeat. Contact Trenton at tdaniel@healthbeat.org or on the messaging app Signal at trentondaniel.88.
