Mary Lou Jepsen, Facebook executive director of engineering and Oculus head of display technology, has resigned from her posts to pursue the development of MRI technology that would help cure diseases.
Jepsen announced her departure at the Women of Vision awards banquet of the Anita Borg Institute, where she noted that she will now be focusing on creating MRI machines in the form of wearable devices to bring the technology to every doctor's office in the world.
According to Jepsen, she has been thinking about the idea for about a decade, and now she is excited to begin with her new venture.
"I never stopped dreaming of how to create a wearable to communicate with our thoughts, how to do this at consumer electronics pricing. I want to get this to every doctor in the world," Jepsen said at the event.
Jepsen is known in the industry for her contributions as a pioneer in display technology as a co-founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative and as former chief of Google's display division as well as for her now-ending roles in Facebook and its virtual reality arm Oculus.
The trailblazing executive is leaving Facebook just as the social network is ramping up its efforts in the virtual reality industry, where applications of the technology are starting to expand beyond video games and into fields such as communication, education and healthcare.
Facebook has not responded to requests for a comment, and no replacement for Jepsen has yet been named or suggested.
The news comes right after Oculus shuffled its management team, with founding COO Laird Malamed moving to another executive position within the company and replaced in the post by Fitbit COO Hans Hartmann. Hartmann has been with Fitbit for five years, with his expertise including product development and launch, supply chain and manufacturing management, contract negotiations and design, among other things.
