UCL alumnus and AI innovator awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry

He shares the prize with his colleague at Google DeepMind, John M. Jumper, for using artificial intelligence to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, the building blocks of life. He is UCL's 32^nd Nobel laureate and second this week.

Sir Demis completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL in 2009 before continuing as a post-doc at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL (the unit’s founder was also awarded a Nobel Prize yesterday), and then went on to co-found a London-based machine learning AI startup, Google DeepMind. 

The company, which was acquired by Google in 2014, aims to meld insights from neuroscience and machine learning with new developments in computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will work towards the creation of an artificial general intelligence. It has consistently been at the forefront of AI development, producing landmark research breakthroughs such as AlphaGo (the first program to beat the world champion at the complex game of Go) and AlphaFold.

Heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein folding, AlphaFold2 – the successor to AlphaFold – forms the basis of Sir Demis’s prize, as he and his DeepMind colleagues used AI to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a sequence of amino acids. This discovery, which the Nobel Prize committee heralded as having enormous potential, has allowed them to predict the structure of almost all the 200 million known proteins.

Sir Demis maintains strong connections with UCL where he has taught about cutting edge industry technology on the MSc Machine Learning course and in late 2023 he delivered the UCL Prize Lecture in Life and Medical Sciences. Google DeepMind is a long-term philanthropic partner of UCL, supporting postgraduate scholarships across a number of AI-related subjects, the Google DeepMind Chair in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Centre for AI, and the Google DeepMind Fellow in Sustainable AI.

Professor Geraint Rees, UCL Vice-Provost (Research, Innovation & Global Engagement), was Sir Demis’s secondary supervisor when he completed his PhD in 2009, while Professor Eleanor Maguire was primary supervisor. Professor Rees said: “Demis has always been a brilliant and highly creative researcher and innovator, and we are immensely proud to have him as part of the UCL community. It is tremendously exciting to hear he has won the Nobel Prize, and at the same time entirely unsurprising.

“Demis is a world leader in devising ways to use AI for the benefit of humanity, realising its potential creatively and responsibly. His work in predicting the complex structures of proteins, the building blocks of life, opens up worlds of possibilities.”

In a statement released by Google DeepMind, Sir Demis said: "Receiving the Nobel Prize is the honour of a lifetime. Thank you to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to John Jumper and the AlphaFold team, the wider DeepMind and Google teams, and to all my colleagues past and present that made this moment possible. I’ve dedicated my career to advancing AI because of its unparalleled potential to improve the lives of billions of people. AlphaFold has already been used by more than two million researchers to advance critical work, from enzyme design to drug discovery. I hope we'll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI's incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery."

Sir Demis’s work has been cited over 100,000 times and has featured in Science’s top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year on five separate occasions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017 he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people and was knighted in early 2024.

This is the second Nobel Prize for the UCL community this week, following on from Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton, founded of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday. Before learning about his own Nobel Prize win, Sir Demis publicly congratulated his former colleague Professor Hinton and praised his work in “[laying] the foundations for the deep learning revolution that underpins the modern AI field”.

Links

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 announcement
• Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL
• UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
• AI for People and Planet at UCL
• Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton awarded Nobel Prize in Physics 

Image

• Top: Sir Demis Hassabis (courtesy of Google DeepMind).
• Lower: Sir Demis Hassabis speaking at UCL in 2023. Credit: James Tye