Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li Wins Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

Fei-Fei Li. the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University, has been awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. She is the only woman out of this year’s seven total recipients. The annual award recognizes scientists whose outstanding engineering innovation has contributed to the global benefit of humanity.

At Stanford, Dr. Li serves as co-director of the Institute of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Earlier in her tenure, she directed the university’s Artificial Intelligence Lab for five years. During a sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, she served as vice president at Google and chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Currently, she serves as co-founder and chief executive office of World Labs, an AI company focusing on spatial intelligence and generative AI.

In her research, Dr. Li studies cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and the intersection of AI and healthcare. She is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the development of modern AI and revolutions in deep learning. She recently published The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (Flatiron Books, 2023), a memoir reflecting on her career and groundbreaking contributions to the field of AI.

Dr. Li is an honors graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in physics. She holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.