Speaking Up: Health and Tech in the Mountains

Each summer, the Aspen Ideas Festival brings together thinkers and leaders to discuss the ideas that shape the world. This year, one of the speakers was MedCAD’s own Nancy Hairston. In a session titled Ideas at the Speed of Thought, she spoke about the wonders of patient-matched implants, and how these therapies are possible because of technological advances in imaging and 3D printing. Since this was an event all about big ideas, she also took the crowd step-by-step into the future, ending with the possibility of printing vascularized implants of a patient’s own biomaterial, and the promise that implants could one day make us stronger, better, and faster. Watch her presentation here.

Sculpting Tomorrow’s Surgeries At the intersection of sculpture, science, and surgery, Nancy Hairston — artist, innovator, and CEO of MedCAD — is reshaping the future of personalized medicine. In this inspiring talk from the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival, Nancy shares her remarkable journey from creating biologically inspired art to leading a company that crafts life-changing, patient-specific implants using cutting-edge 3D printing technology.

During her session, she took turns on the stage with other thinkers, including Chet Kittleson, the co-founder of Tin Can, a screen-free phone that offers kids the freedom that comes from land lines without the problems of smartphones. Also in the session was Dustin Ross, the founder and CEO of Sunflower Network, an organization building prefabricated modular buildings — including a pediatric hospital in Ukraine, where construction workers are busy fighting the war.

Nancy also had a chance to take in a lot of the Ideas Festival programming. “I was most impressed with a session featuring Alexander Vindman, who spoke about the war in Ukraine and how Russian conventional weapons are not doing well against the latest technology and drones that the Ukrainians are building,” she says. “But the session that made me feel best about humanity was about the LA neighborhood of Watts, and how a citizen filmmaking project reduced violent crime by 90%.” That film, Nothing to See Here: Watts, will be released in the fall.

While she was in Aspen, Nancy was also part of a panel at the Aspen Inspire Luncheon, which raised awareness and funds for the International Esperanza Project. IEP partners with communities in Latin America to make improvements to homes, healthcare, and education — including temporary clinics and surgical centers which see hundreds of patients who would otherwise have no access to medical care.