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John Jumper
John Jumper
	Jumper at 2024 Nobel Ceremonies
Born	John Michael Jumper; 1985 (age 38–39); Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
Education	Vanderbilt University (BS); University of Cambridge (MPhil); University of Chicago (MS, PhD);
Known for	AlphaFold
Awards	Marshall Scholarship (2007); Nature's 10 (2021); BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022); Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023); Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024)
	Scientific career
Fields	Artificial intelligence; Machine learning
Institutions	Google; DeepMind
Thesis	New methods using rigorous machine learning for coarse-grained protein folding and dynamics (2017)
Doctoral advisor	Tobin R Sosnick; Karl Freed

John Michael Jumper (born 1985)^[1] is an American chemist and computer scientist. He currently serves as director at Google DeepMind.^[2]^[3]^[4] Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold,^[5] an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy.^[6] Jumper stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures.^[7]

The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021.^[6]^[8] Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.^[9]^[10]

Education

Jumper received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007,^[11] a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship,^[12] a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017.^[13] His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.^[14]

Career

Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.^[2]

AlphaFold

AlphaFold^[5]^[15] is a deep learning algorithm developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. It is an artificial intelligence program which performs predictions of protein structure.^[16]

Awards and honors

In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.^[17]^[18]^[19] This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match, within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT.^[20]^[21]

In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine".^[22] In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences^[23] and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein.^[24] In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award^[25] and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.^[26]

In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, the other half went to David Baker for computational protein design.^[9]^[10]