NYC Health Department Alumni Chapter

The newest member of an unofficial P&S alumni club at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is Hillary Kunins’96, who joined the department in July 2012 as assistant commissioner and head of the Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Use—Prevention, Care and Treatment.

Dr. Kunins joined the city after more than a decade at Montefiore Medical Center, where she was residency director for the primary care and social internal medicine programs. After a residency at Montefiore and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, she joined Montefiore/Einstein as medical director of a substance abuse treatment clinic. She also served as the Division of Substance Abuse’s director of women’s health. Dr. Kunins remains on the faculty of Einstein as clinical professor in three departments: medicine, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and family and social medicine. She also has a master’s degree in public health from Columbia.

Other members of the city health department alumni chapter are Deborah Dowell’96 (director of special projects for Health Commissioner Tom Farley), Ann Inglesby Winters’97 (medical specialist), and Amanda Parsons’03 (deputy commissioner).

Dr. Dowell joined the city health department in 2011. Last year, Dr. Dowell and Commissioner Farley co-authored a viewpoint in Lancet that outlined New York City’s efforts to solve problems that have an impact on New Yorkers’ health (including the tobacco control campaign, restrictions on use of artificial trans fat in restaurants, and promotion of bicycling). After residency, Dr. Dowell joined NYU and remains on the faculty there as clinical assistant professor of medicine. She was a physician for Gouverneur Healthcare Services in the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation from 1999 to 2007. She joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as an epidemic intelligence service officer in 2007 and stayed at CDC as a medical epidemiologist in the CDC’s Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention until 2011. 

After finishing a residency in internal medicine in 2000, Dr. Winters joined the health department as a clinician in the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control. She worked in the clinics and in the epidemiology office of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control until 2007, when she joined the Bureau of Communicable Disease. As medical editor she develops reference materials, training programs, and a monthly seminar series for health department physicians who respond to calls of public health urgency, including concerns about biothreat agents and other acute infectious diseases.

Dr. Parsons joined the NYC health department in 2008. As deputy commissioner of health care access and improvement, she oversees the Primary Care Information Project, correctional health services, and primary care access and planning as well as legal, administration, IT, and operations for the division. Before becoming deputy commissioner, Dr. Parsons was assistant commissioner for the Primary Care Information Project, which seeks to improve population health through health information technology and data exchange, after serving as director of medical quality, during which she created and led quality improvement, billing consulting, and electronic medical record consulting teams sent to small physician offices as part of the Primary Care Information Project. Dr. Parsons, who also has an MBA from Columbia, started her career at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, where her clients included global public health concerns and pharmaceutical and medical product companies.