A surgical oncologist specializing in women's cancers, Dr. Stephanie Kuku spent over 15 years engaged in both clinical practice and research at Britain's National Health Service and HCA Healthcare. She was awarded a Doctorate in Clinical Research in Oncology and remains an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL's Institute of Women's Health.

More recently, Dr. Kuku served as Senior Advisor of Clinical AI/Medical Devices at the WHO. She has also worked extensively as a Health Technology Director for a leading consultancy in digital health and artificial intelligence, leading due diligence and clinical/scientific validation of technology for over 50 AI and deeptech startups, at the intersection of scientific, product, regulatory, and go-to-market strategy.

Dr. Kuku’s earliest benchmark for what innovation in medicine could look like came as a medical student, on an elective at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York – an early glimpse of what it meant to be at the center of innovation in research and medicine. Years later, working as a clinician, she began to feel something shift: a growing sense that the problems standing between her and the care she wanted to deliver couldn't be solved from inside the system alone. It led her to step away from full-time clinical practice and into health technology – work she now describes not as a departure from medicine, but as a continuation of it, by other means.

Today, Dr. Kuku serves as Chief Regulatory & Scientific Affairs Officer at Conceivable Life Sciences – a New York-based startup that is pioneering the use of robotics, and Physical AI to make IVF treatment more reliable and cheaper. In this conversation, Dr. Kuku reflects on why stepping outside the system was necessary to drive real change, how her clinical training continues to shape the company she’s helping to build, what she’d tell those thinking about making a similar leap, and where she sees the future of healthcare heading.

My pivot away from full-time clinical practice didn't come from a single dramatic moment. It came from a slow build of frustration – not with medicine itself, but with everything standing between me and the care I wanted to deliver. I found myself worrying more about fixing the problems that were preventing me from working as a clinician than almost anything else. A conversation with another physician, one who had already left clinical practice, has always stuck with me: if you're part of the problem, if you're inside it, you can't really be an objective part of the solution.

Making that leap required trusting instinct over certainty. I think innovative problem solvers are also people with very good instincts – the conviction to pursue an idea even when you're not sure it's the right one, because you don't know until you explore it.

That same outside vantage point is what made the years before Conceivable so valuable. I spent years on the outside, yet inside more than 50 startups, advising on regulatory strategy, clinical validation, and go-to-market. Most operators end up specializing in one piece of it: science, product, regulatory, or commercial. My superpower is that having been part of building with so many startups, I have become uniquely multi-disciplinary.

That outside perspective also came with the discipline of tracking outcomes over time. Early in working with a company, my team at Hardian would often discuss whether we believed it would still be around in two to five years – and over time, we became fairly accurate in our assessments. For founders and investors, that kind of clear-eyed assessment is much harder. Confirmation bias sets in; once you believe in something and you've sold yourself on it, it's difficult to take a step back and see it from the outside. Now as an operator at Conceivable Life Sciences I come with a strong conviction of its eventual success.

My clinical training remains the foundation of how I operate. If you can make decisions as if a patient were in the room – just as you would when assessing someone for infertility or operating on a tumor – it changes how you think about technology, and how you choose to use it to scale a solution. Being a clinician-scientist means being driven, at your core, by the possible impact on an individual life. What's exciting about technology is that it lets you take that impact and multiply it.

That grounding has a direct business logic too. I've come to believe that if you can truly have an impact on a lot of patients with a scalable solution, the return on investment follows. There's also a more practical inheritance from medical training. As a clinician-surgeon, you become accustomed to a standard of care that is non-negotiable. That same commitment to excellence translates directly to building and scaling a startup. If you build a company with the same standard of care you expect your product to deliver, that standard runs through the values of the company itself.

When I think about what I'm most proud of in my career so far, it isn't a title or a milestone. It's being there from the beginning – part of the founding team at Conceivable – using today’s most advanced technologies to address a problem I care deeply about: expanding access to fertility care. I think everyone should be part of a founding team, or part of something they truly believe in. There's something truly special about that.

Clinicians ask me about transitioning into tech all the time – two years into medicine or twenty. I answer by saying – start with understanding the landscape: frontier tech scaling precision medicine, discovery therapeutics, treatments and platforms.

But the landscape is the easy part. My real question never changes: what problem are you passionate about solving? You have to leave medicine with a passion, not just an exit. My own path ran through that question. First, access to cancer services. Then fertility treatment – because I was trying to have a baby myself. Then using AI to solve the problems I already cared about.

From there it's about what makes you distinctive – your unique selling point. I thought mine was fixing access with technology. Over time I realised it was rarer: multidisciplinary expertise – science, product, regulatory, commercial – all combined.

This goes for trainees too. You have a unique set of eyes on the front line – but only if you use them. So practise asking: if I could solve this, how would I, with today's tech and tomorrow's? What works in another industry that healthcare hasn't borrowed? That thinking isn't optional. It's what we owe patients.

IVF has been described as concierge medicine for the privileged few – a treatment that works but isn't accessible to everyone who needs it. I agree with the underlying point: it's a perfect example of a problem that has been solved, but not efficiently enough to be accessible to everyone. Technology is what closes that gap – not as the headline, but as the mechanism. It isn’t the goal in itself; it’s the tool that makes a solution more reliable, more consistent, more scalable, so that outcomes improve, more cases can be handled by the same number of staff, and treatment can reach more of the people who need it. This is where I believe technology will have its biggest impact on healthcare: not in discovering new treatments, but in determining how well an existing one can scale.

When I think about where the future of healthcare is heading, I keep coming back to a theory  we talk a lot about with Conceivable’s Founders: the adjacent possible – the idea that what is possible now allows for what comes next. I think we’re at exactly that kind of moment, and there’s a gap to close. Fundamentally, I believe the future of healthcare is obvious: it's about using rapidly evolving technologies to solve the scale problem. Wherever you are in the world, access to healthcare is unequal – in fertility, in cancer, in rare diseases. Using technology to scale access and scale treatment is where the opportunity sits, and it's why I find the work at Conceivable so exciting.