Saturday, November 7, 2026

9:15 AM - 9:45 AM

Ballroom 1 and 2

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Overview

Prof Hanneke Hulst

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Details

Science and healthcare have become extraordinarily good at zooming in. We train experts who know more and more about increasingly specific parts of a problem. An expertise that is essential. But the complex challenges we face today also require us to zoom out. In this keynote, Hanneke Hulst reflects on how highly specialised fields can create blind spots, and why progress often depends on connecting different ways of seeing. Drawing on examples from neuroscience, healthcare and academic leadership, she explores the complementary roles of hyperspecialists and generalists, and asks how we can create teams in which different kinds of expertise genuinely strengthen one another. For disciplines that work at the intersection of science, clinical practice and patient care, this raises an important question: how do we preserve deep expertise while still seeing the bigger picture? Hanneke argues that the answer is not for everyone to know everything, but to build environments in which perspectives meet, collaboration is genuinely valued, and team science can flourish. Because sometimes, in science and healthcare, 1 + 1 really can equal 3.

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Speaker