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John M. Jumper

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John Jumper
John Jumper presenting his Nobel Lecture at the 2024 Nobel Prizes
Born
John Michael Jumper

(1985-01-01) 1 January 1985 (age 41)
Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
Education
Known forAlphaFold
AwardsMarshall 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
FieldsArtificial intelligence
Machine learning
WorkplacesGoogle DeepMind
ThesisNew Methods Using Rigorous Machine Learning for Coarse-Grained Protein Folding and Dynamics (2017)
Tobin R. Sosnick
Karl Freed

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 along with David Baker for computational protein design.[3][4]

Jumper served as a director at Google DeepMind for nearly nine years. 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][7] The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024.[8]

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][9]

In June 2026, Jumper announced that he would leave the company to join Anthropic after a break.[10]

Education

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Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003.[11] He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007,[12] 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 2008 on a Marshall Scholarship,[13] 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.[14] His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.[15]

Career

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Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.[16]

This image represents the final product of AlphaFold and it compares its results with other competitors at the CASP competition.

AlphaFold[5][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]

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]

In 2026, Jumper left DeepMind and joined Anthropic.[24]

Awards and honors

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David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper at 2024 Nobel Prize Conference

In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine".[25] In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences[26] and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein.[27] In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award[28] and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.[29]

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.[30][31] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year.[32] In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.[33]

References

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  1. ↑ "John M. Jumper". Munzinger Biographie (in German). Retrieved April 4, 2026.
  2. ↑ "John M. Jumper: Facts". The Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize Outreach AB. 2024. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  3. 1 2 "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024". Nobel Media AB. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  4. 1 2 "Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  5. 1 2 Jumper, John Michael; Richard Evans; Alexander Pritzel; et al. (2021). "Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold". Nature. Bibcode:2021Natur.596..583J. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2. PMC 8371605. PMID 34265844. Wikidata Q107555821.
  6. 1 2 Maxmen, Amy (2021). "Nature's 10: John Jumper: Protein predictor". Nature. 600 (7890). Springer Nature: 591–604. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-03621-0. PMID 34912110. S2CID 245256541.
  7. ↑ Eisenstein, Michael (2021). "Artificial intelligence powers protein-folding predictions". Nature. 599 (7886). Springer Nature: 706–708. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-03499-y. S2CID 244528561. Retrieved December 24, 2021.
  8. ↑ Varadi, Mihaly; Bertoni, Damian; Magana, Paulyna; Paramval, Urmila; Pidruchna, Ivanna; Radhakrishnan, Malarvizhi; Tsenkov, Maxim; Nair, Sreenath; Mirdita, Milot; Yeo, Jingi; Kovalevskiy, Oleg; Tunyasuvunakool, Kathryn; Laydon, Agata; Žídek, Augustin; Tomlinson, Hamish (January 5, 2024). "AlphaFold Protein Structure Database in 2024: providing structure coverage for over 214 million protein sequences". Nucleic Acids Research. 52 (D1): D368–D375. doi:10.1093/nar/gkad1011. ISSN 1362-4962. PMC 10767828. PMID 37933859.
  9. ↑ John Jumper on LinkedIn
  10. ↑ John Jumper [@JohnJumperSci] (June 19, 2026). "A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge)" (Tweet) – via X (formerly Twitter).
  11. ↑ Academy, Pulaski. "Pulaski Academy Alumnus John Jumper Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry". blog.pulaskiacademy.org.
  12. ↑ Doster, Stephen (August 8, 2023). "John Jumper, developer of AlphaFold, to present an Apex Lecture on August 30". Vanderbilt University. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  13. ↑ "University of Cambridge alumni awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | University of Cambridge". www.cam.ac.uk. October 9, 2024. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  14. ↑ "UChicago alum John Jumper shares Nobel Prize for model to predict protein structures | University of Chicago News". news.uchicago.edu. October 9, 2024. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  15. ↑ Jumper, John Michael (2017). New methods using rigorous machine learning for coarse-grained protein folding and dynamics. chicago.edu (PhD thesis). University of Chicago. doi:10.6082/M1BZ647N. OCLC 1237239279. ProQuest 1883866286.
  16. ↑ John Jumper publications indexed by Google Scholar
  17. ↑ Senior, Andrew; Richard Evans; Jumper, John Michael; et al. (2020). "Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning". Nature. 577 (7792): 706–710. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1923-7. PMID 31942072. Wikidata Q92669549.
  18. ↑ "AlphaFold". Deepmind. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
  19. ↑ "AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology". Deepmind. November 30, 2020. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
  20. ↑ Sample, Ian (December 2, 2018). "Google's DeepMind predicts 3D shapes of proteins". The Guardian. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
  21. ↑ Shead, Sam (November 30, 2020). "DeepMind solves 50-year-old 'grand challenge' with protein folding A.I." CNBC. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
  22. ↑ "DeepMind's protein-folding AI has solved a 50-year-old grand challenge of biology". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved November 30, 2020.
  23. ↑ Robert F. Service, 'The game has changed.' AI triumphs at solving protein structures, Science, November 30, 2020
  24. ↑ Ha, Anthony (June 20, 2026). "Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for rival Anthropic". TechCrunch. Retrieved June 21, 2026.
  25. ↑ "BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2022". frontiersofknowledgeawards-fbbva.es.
  26. ↑ "Wiley Prize 2022". wiley.com.
  27. ↑ "Breakthrough Prizes 2023". breakthroughprize.org. Retrieved September 22, 2022.
  28. ↑ Foundation, The Gairdner (March 30, 2023). "2023 Canada Gairdner Award Winners Announced". The Gairdner Foundation. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  29. ↑ Admin, Lasker. "AlphaFold—for predicting protein structures". Lasker Foundation. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  30. ↑ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  31. ↑ "2025 Marshall Medal Recipient Dr. John Jumper". www.marshallscholarship.org. Retrieved May 19, 2025.
  32. ↑ "Exceptional scientists elected as Fellows of the Royal Society". Royal Society. May 20, 2025. Retrieved May 22, 2025.
  33. ↑ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 130 Members and 28 International Members" (Press release). National Academy of Engineering. February 10, 2026.
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