Jim Fan
Jim Fan (also known in academic publications as Linxi Fan) is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence, robotics, and embodied intelligence. He currently serves as Director of AI and Distinguished Research Scientist atNVIDIA, where he is responsible for advancing research in Physical AI and general-purpose robotics. He is the co-lead of Project GR00T, NVIDIA’s major initiative to build foundation models for humanoid robots, and a co-founder and leader of the GEAR Lab (Generalist Embodied Agent Research). His work focuses on solving Physical AGI by enabling machines to learn, reason, and act in both real and simulated environments.
Before his current role, Jim Fan was Senior Manager and Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA (2024–2025), where he founded the GEAR research team. Earlier, he served as Senior Research Scientist (2023–2024) and Research Scientist (2021–2023), during which he led major projects includingVoyager, MineDojo, Eureka, VIMA, Prismer, and World of Bits. His paper “MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge” won the NeurIPS Best Paper Award and later the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. His research on AI agents and robotics has been widely covered by global media includingThe New York Times, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Wired, TechCrunch,andVentureBeat.
Jim Fan earned his PhD in Computer Science fromStanford University(2016–2021), advised by Professor Fei-Fei Li, focusing on deep reinforcement learning, robotics, computer vision, and large-scale systems. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science atColumbia University(2012–2016) as Valedictorian, graduating with a perfect GPA and receiving the Illig Prize.
He has held research internships atOpenAI, NVIDIA,BaiduAI Labs, Mila (Quebec AI Institute),Google CloudAI, and Stanford University, working closely with researchers includingAndrew Ng,Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and Dario Amodei. Notably, he was OpenAI’s first intern in 2016 and co-developed the OpenAI Universe Initiative.
