Samir Desai

Biography

Samir Desai is vice president of talent management and organization development for NorthShore University Health System. In this role, he is responsible for developing the skills and capabilities of NorthShore team members - physicians, nurses, other clinical and administrative staff. His goal is to create health care teams who can better lead and care for themselves, so that they can better care for patients.

His team, as part of human resources, drives this through leadership development, engagement, wellbeing, high impact learning programs, and performance management.

Prior to this, Samir led learning and organization development for Northwestern University. In this role, he led the architecture of a leadership development curricula at all levels, the first ever staff engagement survey, reinvented performance management to be simpler and stronger, implemented digital learning through a new LMS and online learning capabilities, and led diversity and inclusion efforts including a comprehensive curricula to drive more inclusive teams.

Before joining Northwestern, he was the managing director for talent development at Accenture, responsible for the onboarding, learning, performance management, and career development of over 300,000 employees worldwide. This capped a career journey that spanned systems consulting, project management, learning design and development, technology-enabled learning, learning and leadership development, and talent management. He is the co-author of "Return on Learning," Accenture's re-invention of learning aligned with their business strategy.

Samir has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has a master's degree in computer science from Northwestern University, which was a cross-discipline program with cognitive science and education, working at the forefront of using artificial intelligence for adult learning.