李飞飞 Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li

Born 1976 in Beijing, grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Immigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey at age 16 with her parents. Worked weekends at her family's dry-cleaning business while attending Parsippany High School. Earned a BA in Physics from Princeton University (1999, on a full scholarship), then an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Caltech (2005) under Pietro Perona and Christof Koch. As an assistant professor at Princeton (2007), launched the ImageNet project, using Amazon Mechanical Turk to label 14M+ images across 22K categories. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge she created became the catalyst for the deep learning revolution when AlexNet won it in 2012. Joined Stanford as faculty (2009), tenured (2012), full professor (2018). Directed Stanford AI Lab (2013-2018), took a sabbatical as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud (2017-2018). Co-founded Stanford HAI (Human-Centered AI). Founded World Labs (2024) with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall. Won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025). In November 2025 World Labs launched Marble, its first commercial product and the first world model that generates and maintains consistent, explorable 3D environments from text, image, video or 3D layouts, and raised $1B in February 2026 to scale 'spatial intelligence,' targeting gaming, VFX, VR and robotics.