Director, Cancer Center
NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens

Providing Patient-Centered Cancer Care

Dr. Margaret Kemeny, one of the first female Surgical Oncologists in the United States, has been Director of the Queens Cancer Center since its opening in 2002 and has built it into one of the city’s most comprehensive, coordinated cancer treatment institutions.

Under her leadership Queens received the highest accreditation and recognition for excellence from the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons. Its commitment to research brought in one of the first National Institutes of Health grants ever given to NYC H + H.

The center has “saved countless lives because of the integration of all the modalities of cancer treatment into one area,” says Dr. Kemeny, who is also a Professor of Surgery at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “We have a very patient-centered environment that has helped thousands of patients through their course of cancer addressing all of their problems – medical, social and psychological.”

Dr. Kemeny’s career is distinguished by years of innovative clinical and laboratory research and by a technique she developed to treat patients with metastatic liver cancer that involves delivering chemotherapy through a pump into the organ’s main artery. She serves on National Cancer Institute committees and advisory boards and has served on the editorial boards of various prominent oncology and surgery journals.

Her physician parents “strongly encouraged” Dr. Kemeny and her sister to pursue medicine. Dr. Kemeny graduated from Harvard University, received her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and completed internship and residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital, University of Colorado Medical Center, and Downstate Medical Center respectively.

H+H is the first city public health system she has worked in and she says “it is a pleasure” to treat Queens’s uniquely diverse patients. She is motivated, she says, “by love of the atmosphere I work in. The staff “is wonderful and I enjoy dealing with big, complex problems and helping people every day.”

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