Demis Hassabis awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024#
Demis Hassabis MAE, member of the Academia Europaea Informatics section since 2023, was awarded jointly with John M. Jumper one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024
“for protein structure prediction”. The other half was awarded to David Baker “for computational protein design”.
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have successfully utilised artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins.
Demis Hassabis is the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI research organisations. Founded in 2010, DeepMind has produced numerous landmark AI breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the game of Go, and AlphaFold, which was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein folding.
Hassabis has won many prestigious international awards for his research work including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Canada Gairdner Award, and the Lasker Award. His work has been cited over 100,000 times, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Statement by Professor Erol Gelenbe, Chair of the Informatics section of Academia Europaea:
"The Academia Europaea Informatics Section is thrilled that a Computer Scientist and Member of our Section, Demis Hassabis, and the theoretical chemist John Jumper, together share 50% of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for developing the AlphaFold Machine Learning method to solve the 50-year old problem of accurate prediction of the 3-D structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. This discovery and practical implementation holds enormous potential to understand major problems such as antibiotic resistance, and have since been used by the inventors and others to predict the structure of nearly all of the 200 million proteins that are known. We enthusiastically acclaim and congratulate Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for this major award and for their fantastic work."
Academia Europaea congratulates Demis Hassabis to this outstanding distinction!#
