Out of one storm, into the next: Dr. Alister Martin’s first day on the job was during New York City’s recent blizzard.  

Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Martin as commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at the end of January. 

During his first one-on-one interview, the city's new top doctor acknowledged he's got a lot to do. 

Asked about the mixed messages about health coming from the federal government and social media, Martin said, “When federal leadership steps back, we in the city are going to step up.”

“We're going to help to make sure that we make it clear for New Yorkers what the correct public health guidance is, what the public education needs to be, what the vaccine guidance needs to be,” he said.  

That will continue, he said, the job the department is already doing — but the agency is aiming to make its guidance more tangible for New Yorkers, particularly in its fight against health disparities. 

It’s a mantle he says he will assume even in the face of federal funding cuts to diversity and equity services. 

“We have pretty specific evidence that the federal government is not a fan of the work that we're doing on equity, and the reality is we're not gonna stop doing that work on equity,” he said. “But it's going to be my job and this department's job to put ourselves in a position to continue to lead in case the federal government comes and messes with our money.” 

As an appointee of Mamdani, Martin also takes the health department’s helm with a hand on deck to address the city’s affordability crisis. 

For him, he says it’s personal, as his new job is a homecoming of sorts. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens with his mother when he was a young child. 

“Quite frankly, it became unaffordable for my mom even back then,” he said. “And so we moved at the time, back then, to Jersey.” 

Asked how he would reorient the department to provide public health through an affordability lens, Martin said, “The problems that we want to meaningfully begin to address are things like the coming procedural disenrollment wave when it comes to Medicaid.” 

“Helping people make sure that they know that their renewals are coming. The mayor's been clear on his work on housing and preventing evictions," he said. “And to the extent that we can, we're going to play a coordinating role, because we have hundreds of thousands of patients that come through our clinics every single year."

“And so while people are there, if we screen them, we find out that they've got a landlord that sucks, quite frankly. Or if they've got a situation that's not safe, we're going to help connect them to Right-to-Counsel," he added.