PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Rob Fergus

Also known as R. Fergus

Rob Fergus is a computer scientist and AI lab leader whose work spans computer vision, neural networks, and fundamental AI research. He earned degrees at Cambridge, Caltech, and Oxford, then joined NYU and co-founded CILVR with Yann LeCun. He co-founded Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and co-authored a 2013 study of imperceptible image perturbations. His work included an energy-based protein model; his object-recognition paper won the 2013 Longuet-Higgins Prize, and his neural-network study won the 2024 ICLR Test of Time runner-up award. As of October 2026, he leads Meta FAIR after serving as a research director at Google DeepMind.

Works
161
Citations
85,677
h-index
69

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Rob Fergus

Timeline

  1. 2000–2005

    Degrees in engineering

    He earns an engineering degree at Cambridge in 2000, an MSc at Caltech in 2002, and a DPhil at Oxford in 2005.

  2. 2008–2009

    Joining NYU and founding CILVR

    He joins NYU in 2008 and co-founds the CILVR Lab with Yann LeCun in 2009.

  3. 2013

    FAIR and adversarial examples

    He co-founds Facebook AI Research (FAIR) with Yann LeCun in September 2013. He also co-authors “Intriguing properties of neural networks,” which shows how an imperceptible perturbation can make a neural network misclassify an image.

  4. 2013

    A Longuet-Higgins Prize

    CVPR awards Fergus, Pietro Perona, and Andrew Zisserman the 2013 Longuet-Higgins Prize for “Object Class Recognition by Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Learning.”

  5. 2020

    An energy-based protein model

    In 2020, he co-authors an atomic-scale energy-based model of protein conformations, trained on crystallized protein data.

  6. 2024

    An ICLR Test of Time award

    In 2024, ICLR names his co-authored “Intriguing properties of neural networks” paper the Test of Time runner-up; the paper helps spur work on adversarial attacks and defenses.

  7. 2020–2025

    Research director at DeepMind

    From 2020 to 2025, he serves as a research director at Google DeepMind.

  8. Since 2025

    Head of Meta FAIR

    He returns to lead FAIR in 2025. An October 2026 report says researcher Koyejo reports to him at FAIR.

Sources and credits

Photo: cs.nyu.edu; Rob Fergus - Homepage; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: cs.nyu.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Rob Fergus | NYU Courant cims.nyu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. About CILVR wp.nyu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Rob Fergus en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Intriguing properties of neural networks arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. CVPR 2013 Webpage - Awards cvpr2013.thecvf.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Energy-based models for atomic-resolution protein conformations arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. ICLR 2024 Test of Time Award – ICLR Blog blog.iclr.cc. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Rob Fergus, Meta | Frontier Minds frontierminds.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. Meta cuts the AI safety team it acqui-hired from Virtue AI four months ago startupfortune.com. Checked 14 October 2026.