Keynote Speaker
Sylvie Leotin is a health systems innovation scholar, entrepreneur, and speaker who brings an unusual interdisciplinary lens to healthcare. Trained first as a professional ballerina and later in robotics and systems engineering at Stanford, she learned to read the body from within and complex systems from without. When cancer made her a patient, those two ways of seeing converged as she encountered a widening gap between the care medicine documented and the reality she lived. She survived, then turned from patient to investigator, transforming that experience into five years of Genentech-funded research totaling $1.75 million. Her research reframed patient safety and health equity through system design and pioneered new experiential approaches in medical education.
“Sylvie Leotin is a talented storyteller, a wise woman, and a visionary regarding the ills of our healthcare system and how to fix it. If we are ever to improve the care of cancer patients, it will be by listening to voices such as hers.”
— George Sledge, MD, former President, American Society of Clinical Oncology
Speaking Topics
When a ballerina, roboticist, and systems engineer becomes a cancer patient—and maps risks medicine cannot see
How one patient's trajectory became operational intelligence for safer, more equitable care
Why safer, fairer care starts with the system, not the clinician
What AI misses when it mistakes the recorded patient for the person
Teaching clinicians to see care from the patient's side—and what changes when they do
Selected Engagements
Invite Sylvie
Sylvie Leotin welcomes invitations to speak and teach. Drawing on her unusual background as a dancer and systems engineer, and her experience inside healthcare as both patient and investigator, she brings a distinctive perspective to how care is understood, designed, and delivered. If that perspective would be useful to your audience or organization, please get in touch.