LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A scientist born in Little Rock is one of three sharing the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Little Rock-born John Jumper now lives in London and is a director with the Google DeepMind artificial intelligence project as a computational biologist. His Nobel is for his work with proteins using artificial intelligence.
According to the Nobel Committee , in 2020, Jumper worked with Demis Hassabis to develop an artificial intelligence model called AlphaFold2 . AlphaFold helped the pair predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins identified by researchers in 3D.
Before AlphaFold, predicting protein structure was a complex and time-consuming process, officials said.
Nobel officials said that since 2020, more than 2 million people in 190 countries have used AlphaFold2, which has helped them better understand proteins and their potential.
Nobel officials said Jumper, a 1985-born Pulaski Academy alumni, is the youngest chemistry laureate for over 70 years.