Fei-Fei Li, Professor; Co-director, Stanford University; Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She arrived in New Jersey from China as a teenager with little English, ran her family's dry-cleaning shop through college, and went on to build ImageNet, the labeled collection of about 14 million images that let computers learn to recognize objects.

Leaving Chengdu for New Jersey

She was born in Beijing, China, on July 3, 1976, and grew up in Chengdu, a city in Sichuan province in southwest China, where she studied at Sichuan Chengdu No. 7 High School. Her father immigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey, when she was 12, and she and her mother joined him when she was 16. Her parents worked cashier jobs, and she worked in Chinese restaurants.

Running the Family Dry Cleaner

When her mother's health declined just as she entered Princeton, the family needed to "make some money to survive," and opened a dry-cleaning store. As the only one who spoke English, she answered the phones, handled inspections and billing, and talked to customers between physics problem sets. She kept running the shop remotely until halfway through her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology.

"Being a scientist is about resilience because science is exploring the unknown, just as an immigrant is exploring the unknown," she said in 2023. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech in 2005, under Pietro Perona and Christof Koch.

Building ImageNet

After a year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she joined the Princeton faculty in 2007 and started ImageNet, because vision models had almost no large annotated set to train on. ImageNet grew to roughly 14 million images sorted into about 22,000 categories, labeled in part through Amazon Mechanical Turk. From 2010 to 2017 she and her students ran the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, the contest where deep-learning models first pulled far ahead of older methods for naming objects in a photo.

Moving Between Stanford and Google

She joined Stanford in 2009, received tenure in 2012, and directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018. From January 2017 to the fall of 2018 she was vice president and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud. In 2019 she and John Etchemendy, a former Stanford provost, became founding co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Her work reaches beyond the lab. In 2015 she and her former student Olga Russakovsky started SAILORS, a summer AI program for ninth-grade girls, which became the nonprofit AI4ALL in 2017. In 2023 she co-led RAISE-Health with Stanford Medicine to set rules for AI in clinical care and research.

Founding World Labs

In 2024, on partial leave from Stanford, she founded World Labs with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall to build world models, which simulate a three-dimensional scene before a robot or vehicle acts in the physical world. In September 2026 AMD agreed to buy World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock, with Li set to become AMD's chief scientist and an executive vice president.

Honors followed the work. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, and in 2025 she shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Home in Silicon Valley

She lives in Silicon Valley, California, with her husband, Silvio Savarese, a professor at Stanford, and their son and daughter. She still counts the dry cleaner as her first company. "I can tell people, I had a startup when I was 19, and it was a dry cleaning shop," she said.

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