Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is the Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research company, and now a part of Alphabet. DeepMind has produced landmark research 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.

A chess and programming child prodigy, Demis coded the classic AI simulation game Theme Park at age 17. After graduating from Cambridge University in computer science with a double first, he founded the pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios, and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, investigating memory and imagination processes. His work has been cited over 80,000 times and has featured in Science’s top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year on four separate occasions.

Demis is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE. In 2024, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with John M. Jumper, for their groundbreaking contributions to protein structure prediction.

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have been jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their pioneering work on protein structure prediction.