John Jumper B.S. Math ’07 wins Nobel Prize
John Jumper, who received a BS degree in Mathematics and Physics from Vanderbilt in 2007, has won a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jumper works as American Director at Google DeepMind Technologies. His team created the AI model AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures from their amino acid sequence.
About his work Jumper said, “It’s absolutely extraordinary. I’ve been a computational biologist a long time, and I like to say in talks: we need this to work. We need computation to solve the problems of biology, and I just love that it’s starting to work.”
Jumper’s advisor in the Department of Mathematics was Prof. Larry Schumaker. As Prof. Schumaker wrote at the time, “It is clear that John is destined to be highly successful in whatever direction he chooses to go.” Indeed.
Congratulations, John!