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

Sylvie speaks on health systems innovation, patient safety and equity, human-centered design, experiential medical education, and the implications of AI for care. Her talks explore how health systems can recognize risks that conventional models of care leave unseen—and what becomes possible when lived human reality is treated as a source of operational intelligence. Drawing on research, systems thinking, and decades in technology and innovation, she helps audiences see familiar challenges from a different vantage point and consider new possibilities for how care is designed, taught, and delivered.

Selected Engagements

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 distinctive systems perspective shaped by decades in technology and human-centered innovation and five years of Genentech-funded healthcare research. If that perspective would be useful to your organization or audience, please get in touch.