Piotr Dollár
Also known as Piotr Dollar
Piotr Dollár is a computer-vision researcher who co-authored Mask R-CNN, Segment Anything, and SAM 2. He completed a computer-science PhD at UCSD in 2007, held a postdoctoral position at Caltech, and later worked at Anchovi Labs and Microsoft Research. Mask R-CNN received the 2017 ICCV Marr Prize. SAM 2 received an ICLR 2025 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention. In April 2026, he was on Thinking Machines Lab’s technical staff after 11 years at Meta, where he served as a research director.
- Now at
- Thinking Machines Lab
- Works
- 116
- Citations
- 215,321
- h-index
- 65
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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2007
A doctorate on image regions
At UCSD, he completed a computer-science PhD in 2007 with a dissertation on local image regions, then held a postdoctoral position at Caltech.
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2012
From Anchovi to Microsoft
In 2012, he helped cofound Anchovi Labs, which Dropbox acquired, and later spent several years at Microsoft Research.
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2017
A mask branch for detection
Mask R-CNN won the ICCV Best Paper Award (Marr Prize) in 2017; Dollár was one of its co-authors.
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2023
A promptable image model
The Segment Anything project he co-authored introduced an image-segmentation task, model, and dataset.
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2024
Segmentation moves into video
SAM 2 is a foundation model for promptable visual segmentation in images and videos; Piotr Dollár is among its co-authors.
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2025
An ICLR paper honor
At ICLR 2025, SAM 2 received an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention.
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April 2026
A new technical staff role
In April 2026, he was on Thinking Machines Lab’s technical staff after 11 years at Meta, where he served as a research director.
Sources and credits
Photo: pdollar.github.io; Piotr Dollar; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: pdollar.github.io. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.