Sanjay Desai MD MACP 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 Masters, PhD, post-doctoral, 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 LCME, national policy formulation across the educational continuum, and the credit system for continuing medical education.

Prior to the AMA, Dr. Desai was also at Johns Hopkins as Director of the Osler Medical Residency and Vice Chair for Education in the Department of Medicine with appointments in Pulmonary and Critical Care, General Internal Medicine, and the Carey School of Business. Before Hopkins, he was Director of the medical ICU at the Medstar Washington Hospital Center, the largest hospital in Washington D.C.

Dr. Desai is an accomplished clinician, researcher, educator, and administrator with has been 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 including in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, and with a wider reach through podcasts and newspaper editorials.  

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 Economics from the Wharton School of Business in healthcare management. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed his residency and subspecialty fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where is also served as a Chief Resident. Dr. Desai was also a senior advisor for McKinsey & Company, where he also worked as a consultant for variety of industries in the US and in Southeast Asia. Dr. Desai lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and has twin boys in college.