Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FREng FRS awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

The Royal Society extends its warmest congratulations to Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FREng FRS on being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, alongside Professor David Baker and Dr John M. Jumper.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the prize to Baker “for computational protein design”, with the other half shared jointly by Hassabis and Jumper “for protein structure prediction”.

Demis Hassabis, is the CEO and co-founder of AI research company DeepMind (now Google DeepMind), where he has led the development of deep learning systems that have surpassed the best human efforts at tasks from board games to resolving the structure of folding proteins.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said:

“Today’s prize, so soon after the first unveiling of AlphaFold’s potential, is a clear recognition of AI’s transformative role in science.

“As well as being one of the field’s most pioneering researchers, Demis has championed a vision of AI as an enabler that can unlock science’s great challenges and release benefits for all of society.

“It gives me great pleasure to see that work recognised and I offer my warmest congratulations on behalf of the Royal Society.”

Demis Hassabis was born in 1976, a child chess prodigy, he coded the classic game Theme Park aged 17 and founded the pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios after graduating from Cambridge University in computer science.

He completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.