Great Immigrant: Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the United States in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research. Growing up in the outskirts of Paris, LeCun inherited a “technical impulse” from his father, who was a mechanical engineer and inventor. LeCun built synthesizers for his high school band and later became interested in computer programming, earning a degree in engineering from the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique and a PhD from Sorbonne Université.

LeCun wanted to “understand the nature of intelligence: what it is and where it comes from.” He bought a primitive computer with a single circuit board, taught himself to program, and researched academic papers that described the ideas behind what is now called AI. Very few people were working on artificial intelligence at the time. “But I discovered a small community of like-minded scientists, mostly in North America, and went to Canada,” recalls LeCun.

As he was finishing his postdoc at the University of Toronto, LeCun got the call from Bell Labs, which sponsored his visa, and he and his family moved to New Jersey. “If we are to build machines that learn, we have to start somewhere,” says LeCun. At Bell Labs, he started by building a system that could recognize handwritten numbers.

In 2003, LeCun joined New York University as a professor and was founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. He is now Meta’s chief AI scientist for Facebook’s AI Research.

Known as one of the “godfathers” in the field of AI, LeCun received the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. He is the recipient of numerous other honors, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Every Fourth of July, Carnegie Corporation of New York celebrates the exemplary contributions of immigrants to American life, as part of its focus on reducing political polarization and strengthening democracy. To highlight their stories, the foundation has commissioned a new comic series that illustrates how naturalized citizens enrich American society.

Download Yann LeCun’s full comic here.

*23.6 percent of U.S. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workers are immigrants. (Source: New Americans in the United States, American Immigration Council, 2025)

Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill lead Jongsma + O’Neill, a nonfiction storytelling studio. They are Sundance fellows, Emmy nominees, and the creators of the immersive exhibition Loot. 10 Stories, which won the 2024 XR-History Award. 

Chuan Ming Ong is a Dutch illustrator whose illustrations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and Nikkei Asia.