Bio
Some people avoid crises, but Dina Maniotis faces them head-on. Originally from Montreal, Quebec, Ms. Maniotis began her career as a counselor at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn & Queens, addressing issues that ranged from homelessness to the trauma of 9/11 to youth violence. In 2006, she was hired by the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) as the Director of Emergency Services to develop crisis response plans for everything from hurricanes to terrorist attacks. In 2011, Ms. Maniotis was promoted to Assistant Commissioner for OEM and developed a system, activated during Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, to track over 140,000 city employees who volunteered to serve in 500 public shelters in case of a disaster event. Ms. Maniotis took on her current role as Executive Deputy Commissioner and Chief of Staff for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in 2013. When New York City became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Ms. Maniotis was already prepared with sufficient PPE—and although OCME staff handled decedents who were still infectious and worked on the front lines with hospitals, no employees died due to COVID-19. Out of need, Ms. Maniotis reassigned staff from Toxicology and Molecular Genetics operations to decedent management and coordinated with the National Guard in the collection, storage, and caretaking of decedents. “She was the main person working to bring refrigerated trailers to hospitals, maintain and increase OCME’s own morgue capacities, and ensure that not a single decedent was lost during the entirety of the pandemic,” said Dr. Barbara Sampson, former Chief Medical Examiner.
