Health Systems Innovation Scholar, Entrepreneur, Speaker

Interdisciplinary Lens

Sylvie Leotin trained first as a professional ballerina at France's National Conservatory and later in robotics and systems engineering at Stanford, learning to read the body from within and complex systems from without. Dance gave her an embodied sensitivity to felt experience—to what the body registers before the mind can name it. Systems engineering and robotics taught her to see how systems are designed, how they operate, and how they break down. When cancer placed her inside the healthcare system, those two ways of seeing converged. They became the foundation for how she studies health systems, human experience, and the risks that emerge when medicine can't see the reality of the patient.

Experience To Evidence

Leotin pursued those questions through five years of Genentech-funded research totaling $1.75 million. Beginning at Emory University School of Medicine, she worked with patients and clinicians to investigate the gaps between lived experience and the institutional account of care, and developed an immersive medical education intervention. She later brought that work into invited lectures and workshops at Stanford Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and Henry Ford Health. As the inquiry deepened, she returned to her own documented cancer trajectory, analyzing it alongside research interviews and the medical literature to surface recurring patterns and build a transferable systems framework.

Reframing Care

The framework Leotin developed offers a way to understand risks that can emerge when care meets its standards, yet consequential parts of the patient's reality remain outside what the system can see. Applied at the population level, it reframes patient safety and health equity as interconnected challenges and opens a new path to address them. It also raises an urgent question for the age of AI: what happens when care is increasingly shaped by systems trained on records that omit essential parts of the patient's reality? She brings this lens to medical education, health systems innovation, and the design of the next generation of care.

Speaking & Teaching

Henry Ford Health logo with blue and dark blue text on a white background.
Emory University School of Medicine logo with a shield and crossed medical instruments
Stanford Medicine logo with shield containing a fern, caduceus staff, and interconnected squares.
Logo of HCSC Health Care Service Corporation with blue medical icons.
Logo of the American Society of Transplantation with the abbreviation 'AST' in blue and the full name in blue and green text.
NIH logo next to text that reads 'National Cancer Institute' in maroon letters
Logo for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization with a purple floral design and the acronym NHPCO.
Merck logo with a stylized teal cross symbol and black text.
ASCO logo in blue text on a white background.
Yale University School of Medicine logo with shield, red and white stripes, and gold medical staff symbol

Invite Sylvie

Sylvie Leotin welcomes invitations to speak, teach, advise, and collaborate across medicine, health systems, technology, and design. She brings a rare combination—trained as both a dancer and a systems engineer, and informed by her own experience inside the healthcare system—to how care is understood, designed, and delivered. If that perspective would be useful to your work, please get in touch.