John M. Jumper facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John Jumper
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Jumper at 2024 Nobel Ceremonies
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John Michael Jumper
1985 (age 39–40) Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
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| Education |
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| 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 |
John Michael Jumper, born in 1985, is an American scientist who works with chemistry and computers. He is a director at Google DeepMind, a company that creates artificial intelligence.
John Jumper and his team made something amazing called AlphaFold. It's an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can guess the exact shapes of tiny building blocks in our bodies called protein structures. It does this by looking at their amino acid sequences, which are like their unique codes. They plan to share the shapes of 100 million proteins with the world!
In 2021, a science magazine called Nature said he was one of the top ten most important people in science. In 2024, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They received this huge honor for their work on predicting protein structures.
Education and Learning
John Jumper studied many different subjects. In 2007, he earned a degree in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University. He then went to the University of Cambridge in 2010, where he studied theoretical physics. He received a special scholarship called the Marshall Scholarship to do this.
Later, he studied theoretical chemistry at the University of Chicago. He earned a master's degree in 2012 and a PhD in 2017. His teachers at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.
Career and Discoveries
John Jumper's main work is about finding new ways to predict the shapes of proteins. Proteins are very important for life. Their shape helps them do their jobs in our bodies.
What is AlphaFold?
AlphaFold is a special computer program that uses deep learning. This means it learns from lots of data, much like a brain. John Jumper and his team at DeepMind created it. DeepMind is a research lab owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc.
AlphaFold's main job is to guess the 3D shapes of proteins. This is a very hard problem in science. Knowing a protein's shape helps scientists understand how it works. It can also help them create new medicines.
Awards and Honors
In November 2020, AlphaFold won a big international competition. It was called the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP). This competition tests which computer programs can best predict protein shapes.
AlphaFold did much better than other programs. It scored over 90 for about two-thirds of the proteins. This score is based on something called the global distance test (GDT). A GDT score of 100 means the predicted shape is a perfect match to the real one.
John Jumper has received many awards for his work:
- In 2021, he won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
- In 2022, he received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences.
- In 2023, he won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for creating AlphaFold.
- Also in 2023, he was given the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.
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In 2024, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They won for their amazing work on predicting how proteins fold. The other half of the prize went to David Baker for his work on designing new proteins using computers.
