Fei Fei Li

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018.

During her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, Dr. Li was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.

Dr. Li’s current research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and AI in healthcare, particularly ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. Her past research focused on cognitive and computational neuroscience.

She is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has significantly advanced deep learning and AI. Dr Li is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI and is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL, which aims to increase inclusion and diversity in AI education.

Dr. Li has published more than 200 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Digital Medicine. Her book, ‘The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI’, offers an engaging narrative of a scientist's journey and a clear explanation of the origins and nature of artificial intelligence.

Dr. Li is also a TED Speaker, delivering insights on spatial computing, AI, and related fields. She has worked extensively to contribute to the birth of modern AI, and is rightly called 'The Godmother of AI".

Dr. Li received her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with high honors, and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor. Before that, she was on the faculty at Princeton University (2007-2009) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005-2006). Dr. Fei-Fei Li, featured on Edelman’s 2025 “AI Creators You Need to Know” list, is a renowned computer scientist and AI expert.

Currently, Dr. Li is building a startup that uses human-like processing of visual data to enable artificial intelligence (AI) to perform advanced reasoning. She raised funds for the company in a recent seed funding round, with investors including Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, a Canadian firm she joined as a scientific partner last year.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. At the age of 12, her father moved to the United States, and she and her mother joined him in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey, when she was 15. She graduated from Parsippany High School in 1995 and was later inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2017.

Dr. Li pursued her undergraduate studies at Princeton University, where she majored in physics and also studied computer science and engineering. She graduated with high honors in 1999, earning a Bachelor of Arts with a major in physics and certificates in applied and computational mathematics and engineering physics. Her senior thesis was titled "Auditory Binaural Correlogram Difference: A New Computational Model for Huggins Dichotic Pitch", supervised by Professor Bradley Dickinson. During her time at Princeton, she worked in her parents' dry-cleaning store on weekends.

Dr. Li then attended the California Institute of Technology, where she earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2005. Her dissertation, ‘Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics’, was supervised by Pietro Perona and Christof Koch. Her graduate studies were supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

From 2005 to 2006, Dr. Li was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She then joined Princeton University's Computer Science Department as an assistant professor from 2007 to 2009. In 2009, she moved to Stanford University as an assistant professor, where she was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012 and full professor in 2018. At Stanford, she served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018 and co-founded the Human-Centered AI Institute.

During a sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to fall 2018, Dr. Li joined Google Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President. Returning to Stanford in the fall of 2018, Dr. Li continued her professorship and expanded her research. She co-founded AI4ALL, a non-profit organisation aimed at increasing diversity and inclusion in AI education. The program, which started as SAILORS at Stanford, expanded to several other universities, including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and UC Berkeley.

Dr. Li's research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, cognitive neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers and is known for her work on the ImageNet project, which significantly advanced large-scale visual recognition. She also worked on reducing bias in image recognition and explored AI applications in healthcare.

Dr. Li has received numerous awards and honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. She has taught courses on deep learning for computer vision and introductory computer vision at Stanford.

In 2020, Dr. Li joined the board of directors of X (formerly Twitter) as an independent director. After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, she was removed from the board. 

In August 2023, she was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board to provide insights on the intersection of science, technology, ethics, governance, and sustainable development.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li's vision centers on advancing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity by creating technology that is ethical, inclusive, and improves people's lives. She emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, integrating AI with humanistic and societal considerations, and prioritizing diversity in AI research and applications. Dr. Li envisions AI as a tool to address global challenges, enhance education, and promote social good, ensuring that technological advancements are aligned with human values and accessible to all.

Fei-Fei Li has received numerous awards and recognition throughout her career, reflecting her significant contributions to the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, and visual understanding. In 1999, she was honoured with the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. In 2006, she received the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship. Her early career was further distinguished by the NSF CAREER Award in 2009. 

Fei-Fei Li's research has also been recognized through accolades such as the Best Paper Honorable Mention at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2010. Fei-Fei Li has been acknowledged by several prestigious fellowships, including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2011. In 2015, Foreign Policy named her one of the Leading Global Thinkers of the year. The following year, she was awarded the IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Prize and the J.K. Aggarwal Prize by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). In the same year, she was also recognized by the Carnegie Foundation as one of the 40 "Great Immigrants." Her contributions to academia were recognized with the WITI@UC Athena Award for Academic Leadership from the University of California in 2017. That year, she was also honoured as one of the Seven Women in Technology by Elle Magazine. 

In 2018, Fei-Fei Li was elected as an ACM Fellow for her work in building large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding and was listed among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes. She also participated in a U.S. Congressional hearing by the Subcommittee on Research and Technology and the Subcommittee on Energy. In 2019, Fei-Fei Li received the Technical Leadership Abie Award from AnitaB.org and was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 Women. The following year, she was elected as a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine. She also received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the California Institute of Technology and became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). 

In 2021, she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022, Fei-Fei Li was honoured with the Thomas S. Huang Memorial Prize by IEEE PAMI. She received the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award in 2023 and was named in the Time AI100 list. Most recently, in 2024, she was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award by Princeton.  Dr. Fei-Fei Li, featured on Edelman’s 2025 “AI Creators You Need to Know” list, is a renowned computer scientist and AI expert.