Sanjay Virendra Desai, MD

Sanjay Desai, M.D., M.A.C.P., is the vice dean of education and Mary Wallace Stanton Professor for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, overseeing all of its educational programming including the medical school, training programs and continuing medical education, as well as the master’s, Ph.D., postdoctoral, online and international programs.

For the last four and half years, he served as the chief academic officer for the American Medical Association, overseeing a large innovation portfolio with a focus on precision education using AI in medical education and working with a consortium of schools, health systems and organizations across the country. He also led their accreditation-related activities with sponsorship of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, national policy formulation across the educational continuum and the credit system for continuing medical education.

Prior to the AMA, Dr. Desai was director of the Osler Medical Residency and vice chair for education in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, with appointments in pulmonary and critical care and general internal medicine, as well as at the Carey School of Business. Before he joined Johns Hopkins, he was director of the medical intensive care unit at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, the largest hospital in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Desai is an accomplished clinician, researcher, educator and administrator who is widely recognized for his accomplishments in academic medicine, policy, clinical practice and health systems administration. His research focuses on generating high-quality data to inform policy and practice in medical education. He has authored over 60 peer-reviewed manuscripts that have appeared in journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA as well as numerous newspaper editorials, and has appeared on many podcasts.  

Dr. Desai grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in bioengineering and a Bachelor of Science in economics with a concentration in healthcare management and policy from the Wharton School of Business. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed his residency and subspecialty fellowship at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he also served as a chief resident. Dr. Desai was also a senior advisor for McKinsey & Company, where he worked as a consultant for a variety of industries in the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. Dr. Desai lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and has twin sons who are in college.