Alphabet Hires Director Of The National Institute of Mental Health For Its

Update: This article has been updated with a response from Google regarding Insel’s role at Life Sciences. Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Google partner Novartis, recently said the company’s glucose-monitoring contact lens for diabetics could move into clinical trials next year, earlier than expected. The search giant, which is in the process of reorganizing into Alphabet, lands a first-rate research scientist and administrator with an exhaustive knowledge of brain and behavioral sciences. During his tenure at the institute, Insel helped establish the Psychiatrics Genomics Consortium, a Research Domain Criteria project to organize mental health research, and other programs. The coup formalizes the expansion of Google’s focus into the detection, management and prevention of mental health disorders and gives it access to expertise Insel accrued while spearheading NIH programs such as the BRAIN Initiative. “I am joining the team to explore how this mission can be applied to mental illness”, he wrote in a statement.

After visiting Silicon Valley this summer for a tour of tech companies including Apple, Google and IBM, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health is coming back – this time to work here.

“Population-based studies have shown that less than half of people with mental illness seek care”, said Insel, adding that making intervention a point-and-click away may increase the likelihood of patients reaching out.

Dr Thomas Insel served as director of the National Institute of Mental Health for 13 years and will formally step down on 1 November, after which he will join the Google Life Sciences team. His addition to the team explores this very hypothesis, and recent progress seems to be pointing to the fact that Google’s life sciences division is ready to deliver on its goal: significantly altering the way physical and mental conditions are diagnosed and dealt with.

Insel dismissed the 2013 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for its “lack of validity”. Dr. Thomas Insel will join Google’s two-year-old research division that licenses its technology to medical and pharmaceutical companies.