Airtel hires former Facebook, NASA exec as chief data scientist

Santanu Bhattacharya has taken up a new position at Airtel as their Chief Data Scientist. 

Bhattacharya comes from rich experience at large organizations such as AOL, where he founded and led their global data analytics team, founded Salorix, which was touted as world's first real-time cross channel social media Ad engagement platform using AI. He also led the mobile growth for engineering markets at Facebook. He spent two years at Delhivery, e-commerce logistics start-up. 

Bhattacharya appointment comes at a time when the telecom major is seeing a major churn at the top. Airtel recently hired a new global CISO following the departure of Siva Sivasubramanian moved back to Optus. The company has hired former Microsoft executive, Manish Tiwari, as its new global information security officer and senior vice president.

Bhattacharya has a Ph.D. in Physics UMD and is an Exec. Business from MIT Sloan and BTech IIT. He has also had a short stint at NASA.