After just five months at Apple, Yoky Matsuoka is reportedly leaving the company.
Bloomberg reported Friday that Matsuoka, a former University of Washington robotics professor, is departing from Apple.
Matsuoka oversaw health initiatives at Apple like HealthKit and ResearchKit. We’ve contacted Matsuoka and Apple for more details and will update this post when we hear back.
Matsuoka taught robotics at the UW and Carnegie Mellon, a job she left to join Google in 2009. After helping start Google X, the search giant’s R&D arm, she officially left UW in 2012 and joined Nest, where she helped build the learning software behind the company’s smart thermostat.
She rejoined Google for a short time in 2014 when the company bought Nest, but left for a job a Twitter the next year. However, health problems kept her from taking taking the job. After a year off and a full recovery, she joined Apple in May.
Besides her work on robotic hands, Matsuoka won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant for her part in helping stroke victims use limbs.
Apple continues to invest in its health-related projects that range from Apple Watch apps to software that utilizes machine learning for analyzing patient health data. Apple is investing heavily in machine learning, as evidenced by its $200 million acquisition in August of Seattle-based startup Turi, a UW spin-off that helps developers and data scientists build machine learning into their apps and research projects.