Mary Sand, PhD is a proven leader with more than 35 years of professional experience in healthcare and higher education. She began her career as a physical therapist and over the years held a variety of leadership positions. Most recently she served as Vice President of Strategic Operations and Performance Excellence for a well-respected healthcare system. She facilitated system-wide strategy development and implementation for this $2.6B system. Mary has extensive experience in leadership development including serving as the Vice President of Leadership and Organizational Development. While in this role, Mary led the transition from a decentralized model to a centralized model for leadership development and staff development impacting 1,100 leaders, 650 physicians and 16,000 frontline staff. Mary’s experience in higher education includes serving as the founding Chair of the Physical Therapy Department at the University of South Dakota. She designed and developed the first and only graduate level physical therapy program in the state of South Dakota. During this time, she also taught graduate courses on management and communication. Most recently, Mary launched Sand Consulting. She is playing to her strengths of facilitation, strategy implementation, leadership development, and speaking at conferences/events.