Verily Life Sciences, the high-profile Google offshoot, has lost the scientist who led its search for better ways to prevent, detect, and treat mental illness — the latest in a string of top executives who have left the company after a short tenure.
Dr. Thomas Insel, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, joined the Silicon Valley startup with fanfare in December 2015. He was lured, he wrote at the time, by the Google philosophy to seek “a 10x impact on hard problems. I am looking forward to a 10x challenge in mental health.”
Verily confirmed the departure in a blog post Monday, saying, “We are bidding a fond farewell to Dr. Thomas Insel, who has helped shape our vision and to build a multidisciplinary team of mental health clinical researchers, data scientists, product designers, and software engineers, all passionately committed to rethinking the way we approach diagnosis and care in mental health. We look forward to carrying this vision forward!”
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