John Jumper

John Jumper is an American chemist and computer scientist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for protein structure prediction, with David Baker recognized for computational protein design. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a master's in theoretical condensed matter physics from Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship in 2008, and a master's and PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012 and 2017. He described himself as an "accidental chemist"; his thesis built code that uses machine learning to simulate how proteins fold.

He joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and was promoted to lead a team working on protein structure prediction. The team developed AlphaFold, which won the CASP14 competition in November 2020 and was released as open-source software in 2021; its team had released 214 million predicted structures by January 2024. He served as a director at DeepMind for nearly nine years. According to Wikipedia, in June 2026 he announced he would leave to join Anthropic after a break. His honors include the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and Lasker Award, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2025.