When asked about his own experiences in children’s health care, Mark Marcantano, the new administrator for the Department of Pediatrics, instead shifts the focus to his predecessor, Ted Chambers: “I never had the gift of working with a prior incumbent before, particularly with someone who has so much institutional knowledge and cares about the place so much. He has been nothing but gracious, supportive, hard-working and a fabulous adviser to me in terms of understanding how things work, the key relationships critical in supporting the work of the Children’s Center and how things need to be prioritized.”

One immediately gets the sense that Marcantano is not only gracious himself, but also greatly values the input of others, especially when it’s experiential. The Long Island native attended undergraduate business school at New York University, followed by law school, and began his own legal practice in environmental law.

A decade later, feeling a bit unfulfilled from obtaining land use approvals and helping developers build shopping malls, he switched his mindset to health care. How and why?

The way he explains it, sometimes opportunities and epiphanies arise in life when you least expect them. “You never know who you’re going to meet and who’s watching your work,” he says.

The person watching his work regarding a legal matter would go on to become the chairman of the board of Albany Medical Center. And, when he did, he called Marcantano and asked him to join his senior leadership team. The conversation, says Marcantano, was short: “I said thanks but no thanks. I didn’t know anything about health care, and medicine was never on my radar.”

But the idea gave Marcantano pause. He was going through an introspective period, one in which he felt like he wanted to do something more fulfilling than making people financially successful. This opportunity, he realized, had fallen into his lap at exactly the right moment; he had to explore it. What he found resonated deeply.

“There was no better mission than supporting world-class health care delivery, training the next generation of the best and the brightest, and advancing discovery and innovation,” says Marcantano. “So I jumped on it with a thirst and a hunger that was not easily rivaled.”

Indeed, after departing Albany Medical Center as senior executive vice president and chief operating officer, he would go on to serve as vice president of ambulatory and network services at Boston Children’s Hospital. Then he accepted the position of president and chief operating officer of Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

In so doing, he amassed a 23-year career as a senior executive health care leader in which he’s seen it all — in both centralized and decentralized environments. Now he finds himself at Johns Hopkins, challenged, in his own words, by the “brilliant complexity” of the institution, which he sees as vital to providing the very best care.

“It’s a good thing I like big, beautiful and messy, which is how a good academic medical center works,” says Marcantano. “The complex challenges we face, the team dynamics, to be around brilliant high-achieving people who want to change the game for patients and advance medicine — that’s all energizing for me.”