John Jumper

John Jumper was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1985 and studied physics and mathematics at Vanderbilt, graduating in 2007. He began a PhD in condensed matter physics at Cambridge on a Marshall scholarship but left after a year and, in the 2008 recession, took a job at D. E. Shaw Research in New York simulating protein motion. "I took my first chemistry class as a Ph.D.," he said later: at the University of Chicago he earned a doctorate in chemistry in 2017 under Karl Freed and Tobin Sosnick, writing machine learning code to model how proteins fold.

He joined DeepMind in 2017. By his own account, Demis Hassabis let him lead the AlphaFold team six months after he finished his PhD. The first AlphaFold won the CASP13 assessment in 2018 but was far from experimental accuracy, so the team discarded it and designed AlphaFold 2 from scratch. At CASP14 in November 2020 it predicted structures close to experimental accuracy; the method was published in Nature in July 2021, and DeepMind and EMBL-EBI later released predictions for about 200 million proteins. He was an author on AlphaFold 3 in May 2024.

Jumper and Hassabis shared the 2023 Lasker, Gairdner and Breakthrough prizes, and in October 2024 half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for protein structure prediction," with David Baker receiving the other half. He had given himself a 10 percent chance and was the youngest chemistry laureate in more than 70 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2025.

On 19 June 2026 he announced that after nearly nine years he would leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic, after time off to recharge. Fortune reported that AlphaFold colleagues Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel also moved to Anthropic. Anthropic had not announced his title by September 2026.