John M. Jumper
American chemist and computer scientist (born 1985)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Michael Jumper (born 1 January 1985)[1][2] is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.[3][4]
1985 (age 40–41)
Nature's 10 (2021)
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022)
Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024)
John Jumper | |
|---|---|
Jumper giving his 2024 Nobel Prize lecture | |
| Born | John Michael Jumper 1985 (age 40–41) Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| 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 |
As of 2025[update] Jumper serves as director at Google DeepMind.[5][6][7] Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold,[8] an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy.[9] The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024.[10]
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.[9][11]
Education
Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003[12]. He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007,[13] a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship,[14] 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.[15] His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.[16]
Career and research
Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.[5]
AlphaFold
AlphaFold[8][17] 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.[18]
Awards and honors
In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.[19][20][21] 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.[22][23]
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In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine".[24] In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences[25] and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein.[26] In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award[27] and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.[28]
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.[3][4]
In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission.[29][30] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year.[31] In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.[32]
