Palak Shah is a professor in Leadership Development and Communications at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University since 2023. Palak’s work at Kellogg deeply reflects his wide interests at the intersection of ethics, leadership development and non-traditional teaching modalities concerning the humanities.

Outside of Kellogg, Palak currently serves as a medical director of a value-based primary care clinic at Oak Street Health and as a clinical instructor in the Department of Family, Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix.

Palak’s teaching methods and content are greatly influenced by his multi-disciplinary background. Palak completed his B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was selected as an Undergraduate Research Fellow to teach a course on the intersection of art and science. Afterwards, he completed his M.P.H at St. George’s University with a concentration in epidemiology. He later completed his M.D. at St. George’s University where he was inducted into the prestigious Gold Humanism Honor Society, reserved for medical students who have demonstrated a high level of empathy and altruism in their practice. Palak later completed his primary care residency in Humboldt Park, Chicago where he facilitated the first narrative medicine book club to bolster empathy through literature in burgeoning physicians and physician collaborators and empower cultural change in medical pedagogy. After residency, Palak completed a two-year fellowship on value-based care leadership with Oak Street Health while simultaneously completing his M.B.A at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Aside from his affinity for literature, Palak loves to travel, pursue photography, train for marathons/half-marathons, and hike near Scottsdale, Arizona where he lives with his wife.