A LIFE ACROSS WORLDS

Sylvie Leotin is a health systems innovation scholar, entrepreneur, and speaker whose career has crossed worlds that rarely meet: professional ballet, science, engineering, technology, and healthcare research.

Trained first as a ballerina at France's National Conservatory and later in robotics and systems engineering at Stanford, she brings together ways of understanding that seldom converge—the embodied intelligence of the dancer and the analytical, systems-level reasoning of the engineer.

For more than two decades, Sylvie worked across Silicon Valley’s technology ecosystem, from software and product roles at Oracle and Sun Microsystems to venture-backed startups and her own innovation practice, Tech Atelier. There, she advised founders and early-stage companies from concept through customer development, positioning, funding, and launch. She also served as interim VP of Marketing for multiple startups.

At Tech Atelier, Sylvie also developed an immersive approach to human-centered design. Beyond observing customers from the outside, she built experiential methods that let product teams inhabit another person's experience—an approach she tested with innovation leaders at Google and other design firms. That method became the intellectual precursor to her work in medicine.

Then cancer placed Sylvie inside one of the most complex human systems. Her training gave her an unusual double perception: the dancer could read the body from within, while the engineer could see the architecture of the system around her. Again and again, she recognized problems before the system did and intervened to correct the course of her care and keep her safe. That experience changed the direction of her work. The patient became the investigator, and her inquiry grew into five years of Genentech-funded research. Beginning at Emory University School of Medicine, she worked with patients and clinicians to investigate the gap between patient experience and the institutional account of care. She brought that same immersive approach into medicine, developing an educational intervention that enabled clinicians to inhabit the patient's experience and see dimensions of care outside the clinical frame.

The work expanded through invited lectures and workshops at Stanford Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and Henry Ford Health, and evolved into a broader systems framework for identifying risk, with implications for patient safety, health equity, whole-person care, and, increasingly, the use of AI in medicine. Sylvie now teaches and speaks nationally to clinicians, health system leaders, and industry audiences, with invited engagements including the National Cancer Institute, Stanford Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and Health Care Service Corporation. 

Sylvie serves as faculty with the Medical Education Speakers Network and previously served on the Editorial Review Board and Editorial Leadership Board of the Journal of Patient Experience. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Patient Experience, STAT, Emory Medicine Magazine, and The Boston Globe.