Two University alumni, Sir Demis Hassabis and Dr John Jumper, have been jointly awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins' complex structures.
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.
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 Prof 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.
Dr John Jumper completed an MPhil in theoretical condensed matter physics at Cambridge in 2011, during which time he was a member of St Edmund's College, before receiving his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.
The duo received the Nobel along with David Baker of the University of Washington, who succeeded in using amino acids to design a new protein in 2003.
