John M. Jumper

John Michael Jumper is an American senior research scientist at DeepMind Technologies. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. Jumper has stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures. 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.

Education
Jumper was educated at the University of Chicago where he was awarded a PhD in 2017 for research on using machine learning to simulate protein folding and dynamics, being co-supervised by Tobin R Sosnick and Karl Freed. Jumper also studied physics at the University of Cambridge, where he was on the Marshall Scholarship, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University.

Career and research
Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.

AlphaFold
AlphaFold 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.

Awards and honours
In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. This international competition benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold won the competition, out performing other algorithms and making it the first machine learning algorithm to be able to accurately predict the 3D structure of proteins.

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