John M. Jumper

For other people named John Jumper, see John Jumper (disambiguation).

John Michael Jumper (born 1985)^[1] is an American chemist and computer scientist. Jumper and Demis Hassabis were awarded with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.^[2][3]

John Jumper
Jumper giving his 2024 Nobel Prize lecture
Born	John Michael Jumper 1985 (age 39–40)[1] Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.[1]
Education	Vanderbilt University (BS) University of Cambridge (MPhil) University of Chicago (MS, PhD)
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

He currently serves as director at Google DeepMind.^[4][5][6] Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold,^[7] an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy.^[8] Jumper stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures.^[9]

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.^[8][10]

Education

Jumper received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007,^[11] a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge in 2010 on a Marshall Scholarship,^[12] 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.^[13] His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.^[14]

Career

Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.^[4]

AlphaFold

See also: AlphaFold and Protein structure prediction

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

AlphaFold^[7][15] 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.^[16]

Awards and honors

In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.^[17][18][19] 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.^[20][21]

In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine".^[22] In 2022 Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences^[23] and for 2023 the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein.^[24] In 2023 he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award^[25] and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.^[26]

Jumper at the 2024 Nobel Week press conference

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.^[2][3]

In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.^[27]