PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Laura Gustafson

Laura Gustafson is a research engineer at Meta whose computer vision work includes the Segment Anything models and the FACET fairness benchmark. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2013 to 2018 and joined Meta in 2018. In 2019 she coauthored the PHYRE physical-reasoning benchmark at Facebook AI Research, and in 2023 she coauthored Segment Anything, which received an ICCV Best Paper Honorable Mention, and was first author of FACET. She also coauthored SAM 2, which received an ICLR 2025 honorable mention, and was a core contributor on SAM 3 in 2025. She works within Meta Superintelligence Labs.

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Timeline

  1. 2013–2018

    Studies at MIT

    She studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an undergraduate from 2013 to 2017 and as a master's student from 2017 to 2018.

  2. 2018

    Research engineer at Meta

    She joins Meta in 2018 as a research engineer.

  3. 2019

    The PHYRE physics benchmark

    In 2019, she coauthors PHYRE at Facebook AI Research with Anton Bakhtin, Laurens van der Maaten, Justin Johnson and Ross Girshick. The benchmark offers simple classical mechanics puzzles in a 2D physical environment, built to encourage learning algorithms that are sample-efficient and generalize well across puzzles.

  4. 2023

    Segment Anything and an ICCV honor

    She is among the twelve authors of Segment Anything, which introduces a promptable segmentation model and a dataset of over 1 billion masks on 11 million images. The paper earns an ICCV Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2023.

  5. 2023

    The FACET fairness benchmark

    She is first author of FACET, presented at ICCV in 2023. The benchmark is a publicly available evaluation set of 32k images with expert-annotated person attributes, built to measure performance disparities across demographic attributes in classification, detection and segmentation.

  6. 2024–2025

    SAM 2 and an ICLR honor

    She coauthors SAM 2, posted in August 2024, a foundation model for promptable visual segmentation in images and videos. In April 2025, ICLR names the paper among its 2025 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mentions.

  7. November 2025

    SAM 3 with concept prompts

    In November 2025, she is a core contributor on SAM 3, a unified model that detects, segments and tracks objects in images and videos from concept prompts such as short noun phrases and image exemplars.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research engineer in Meta Superintelligence Labs

    She is a research engineer at Meta and carries the Meta Superintelligence Labs affiliation on SAM 3, whose second version appears in March 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2018MetaResearch engineer
  2. NowMeta Superintelligence LabsResearch engineer

Education

  1. 2018Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaster's study
  2. 2017Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUndergraduate study

From the biography.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Meta. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Meta Superintelligence Labs. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Meta Superintelligence Labs. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  4. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Meta. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Laura Gustafson yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Laura Gustafson (Meta): computer vision — Lacuna lacuna.tiptreesystems.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. [1908.05656] PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoning arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. [1908.05656] PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoning (ar5iv) ar5iv.arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2304.02643] Segment Anything arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. GitHub - SarahRastegar/Best-Papers-Top-Venues: Best Papers of Top Venues like CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ICCV, ECCV github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark (ICCV 2023 Open Access Repository) openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [2408.00714] SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Announcing the Outstanding Paper Awards at ICLR 2025 – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. [2511.16719] SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts (arXiv HTML, v2) arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.