Two University alumni, Sir Demis Hassabis and Dr John Jumper, have been jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting the complex structures of proteins.
In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper of Google DeepMind presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.
Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.
The duo received the Nobel along with Professor David Baker of the University of Washington, who succeeded in using amino acids to design a new protein in 2003.
Sir Demis Hassabis read Computer Science as an undergraduate at Queens’ College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1994. He went on to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London and create the videogame company Elixir Studios.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, a company that developed masterful AI models for popular boardgames. The company was sold to Google in 2014 and, two years later, DeepMind came to global attention when the company achieved what many then believed to be the holy grail of AI: beating the champion player of one of the world’s oldest boardgames, Go.
In 2014, Hassabis was elected as a Fellow Benefactor and, later, as an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College. In 2024, he was knighted by the King for services to artificial intelligence.
In 2018, the University announced the establishment of a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning, thanks to a benefaction from Hassabis’s company, and appointed Professor Neil Lawrence to the position the following year.
“I have many happy memories from my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, so it’s now a real honour for DeepMind to be able to contribute back to the Department of Computer Science and Technology and support others through their studies,” said Hassabis in 2018.
“It is wonderful to see Demis’s work recognised at the highest level — his contributions have been really transformative across many domains. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next!” said Professor Alastair Beresford, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology and Robin Walker Fellow in Computer Science at Queens’ College.
In a statement released by Google DeepMind following the announcement by the Nobel committee, Hassabis said: “I’ve dedicated my career to advancing AI because of its unparalleled potential to improve the lives of billions of people… I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery.”
Dr John Jumper completed an MPhil in theoretical condensed matter physics at Cambridge’s famous Cavendish Laboratory in 2008, during which time he was a member of St Edmund’s College, before going on to receive his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.
“Computational biology has long held tremendous promise for creating practical insights that could be put to use in real-world experiments,” said Jumper, Director of Google DeepMind, in a statement released by the company. “AlphaFold delivered on this promise. Ahead of us are a universe of new insights and scientific discoveries made possible by the use of AI as a scientific tool.”
“The whole of the St Edmund’s community joins me in congratulating our former Masters student Dr John Jumper on this illustrious achievement – the most inspiring example imaginable to our new generation of students as they go through their matriculation this week,” said St Edmund’s College Master, Professor Chris Young.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge: “I’d like to congratulate Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who, alongside Geoffrey Hinton yesterday, are all alumni of our University. Together, their pioneering work in the development and application of machine learning is transforming our understanding of the world around us. They join an illustrious line-up of Cambridge people to have received Nobel Prizes – now totalling 125 individuals – for which we can be very proud.”
Article updated on 10 October 2024 to reflect that the number of Cambridge people to have received Nobel Prizes now totals 125.
