John Jumper

American chemist and computer scientist at Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMind, prop. n.: Google's main artificial intelligence laboratory, formed in 2023 by joining DeepMind and Google Brain. It builds the Gemini models and scientific AI systems such as AlphaFold. who led the development of AlphaFoldAlphaFold, prop. n.: A DeepMind AI system that predicts the 3D shape of proteins from their chemical sequence, often about as accurately as laboratory experiments. It cracked a problem biologists had worked on for 50 years and won a Nobel Prize. 2. Trained in physics at Vanderbilt and Cambridge, he simulated protein dynamics at D. E. Shaw Research before completing a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago (2017). Joining DeepMind in 2017, he led the team whose AlphaFold 2 system, a deep network combining attentionattention, n.: A way for an AI model to choose what to focus on. For each word it processes, the model scores how relevant every other word is and draws information mostly from the relevant ones. over evolutionary and geometric information, predicted protein structures with accuracy approaching experiment in the CASP14 assessment (2020), a result widely described as solving the long-standing structure-prediction problem for single protein chains. DeepMind and the European Bioinformatics Institute later released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins. He shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis, prop. n.: A British AI researcher and former chess prodigy who co-founded DeepMind, led the teams behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. for protein structure prediction, the other half going to David Baker for computational protein design (see Nobel Prizes for AINobel Prizes for AI, phr.: The two 2024 Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, that honored artificial intelligence research for the first time, recognizing neural-network pioneers and the protein-structure system AlphaFold.); earlier honors include the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.