Ross Girshick

Career

Ross Girshick was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and then worked as a research scientist at Microsoft Research from 2014 to 2015, at FAIR (Facebook, later Meta) from 2015 to 2023, and at the Allen Institute for AI from 2023 to 2024, and in late 2024 co-founded Vercept, which was acquired in early 2026.¹

Research

Girshick's 2013 R-CNN paper with Jeff Donahue, Trevor Darrell and Jitendra Malik brought deep convolutional features to object detection. Girshick followed it with Fast R-CNN in 2015 and co-authored Faster R-CNN, which added region proposal networks, later that year.²⁷⁸

At FAIR, Girshick co-authored Mask R-CNN (2017), which extended detection to instance segmentation, and Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection (2017). Later work moved toward representation learning and segmentation, including Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners (2021), Segment Anything (2023) and SAM 2 (2024).^9101156

Open-source work

Girshick is listed first in the citation entry for Detectron, FAIR's Apache-2.0 object detection system written in Python on Caffe2, and among the authors of its successor Detectron2. The original Segment Anything repository also lists Girshick among its authors and releases the model under the Apache 2.0 license.³⁴¹²

Work and contributions

• Segment Anything (SAM and SAM 2) Open weights

  Co-author of the Segment Anything paper (2023) and the SAM 2 paper (2024). The original repository lists Girshick among its authors and releases the model under the Apache 2.0 license.⁵⁶¹²

• Detectron and Detectron2 Open-source code

  Listed first in the citation entry of Detectron, FAIR's object detection system written in Python on Caffe2 and released under Apache 2.0, and listed among the authors in the citation entry of the Apache-2.0 Detectron2 library.³⁴

• R-CNN Published research

  First author, with Jeff Donahue, Trevor Darrell, and Jitendra Malik, of "Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation" (2013), the R-CNN paper.²

Timeline

1. Nov 11, 2013Released the R-CNN object detection paper as first author.²
2. 2014Joined Microsoft Research as a research scientist.¹
3. 2015Joined FAIR at Facebook as a research scientist.¹
4. Apr 30, 2015Released Fast R-CNN.⁷
5. Jun 4, 2015Co-authored Faster R-CNN, introducing region proposal networks.⁸
6. Mar 20, 2017Co-authored Mask R-CNN.⁹
7. Nov 11, 2021Co-authored Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners.¹¹
8. 2023Joined the Allen Institute for AI as a research scientist.¹
9. Apr 5, 2023Co-authored the Segment Anything paper.⁵
10. 2024Co-founded Vercept in late 2024.¹

Documented roles

The sources do not confirm a current role; these are the roles they document.

• Research scientist, FAIR (2015–2023), Meta (Facebook AI Research)¹
• Research scientist (2023–2024), Allen Institute for AI¹
• Research scientist (2014–2015), Microsoft Research¹
• Co-founder (late 2024; the company was acquired in early 2026), Vercept¹

Honors and recognition

• PAMI Young Researcher Award · IEEE PAMI Technical Committee, 2017¹
• PAMI Mark Everingham Prize (2017, 2021 and 2023) · IEEE PAMI Technical Committee, 2023¹
• Longuet-Higgins Prize (R-CNN) · IEEE PAMI Technical Committee (CVPR), 2024¹
• Helmholtz Prize (Fast R-CNN) · IEEE PAMI Technical Committee (ICCV), 2025¹
• NeurIPS Test of Time Award (Faster R-CNN) · Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025¹

Companies in their history

• Meta 106 people in the wiki
• Ai2 23 people in the wiki
• Microsoft 75 people in the wiki

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