John Michael Jumper (born January 1, 1985, in Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.) is an American chemist and computer scientist working in artificial intelligence and machine learning.^[2] He completed his education at Vanderbilt University (BS), the University of Cambridge (MPhil), and the University of Chicago (MS, PhD), where his 2017 doctoral dissertation under advisors Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed was titled "New Methods Using Rigorous Machine Learning for Coarse-Grained Protein Folding and Dynamics".

Jumper served as a director at Google DeepMind for nearly nine years, where he and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy.^[7,5,6] The AlphaFold team had released 214 million protein structures as of January 2024.^[4] In June 2026, Jumper announced that he would leave Google DeepMind to join Anthropic after taking a break.^[44,43]

His honors include a Marshall Scholarship (2007), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023). The scientific journal Nature named Jumper one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual Nature's 10 listing in 2021. In 2024, Jumper, Demis Hassabis, and David Baker were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein structure prediction.^{[41,42,45,16]}

Jumper graduated from Pulaski Academy in 2003.^[8] He received a Bachelor of Science with majors in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 2007, a Master of Philosophy in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of St Edmund's College, Cambridge in 2008 on a Marshall Scholarship, a Master of Science in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2017.^[11,9,10] His doctoral advisors at the University of Chicago were Tobin R. Sosnick and Karl Freed.^[12]

Jumper's research investigates algorithms for protein structure prediction.^[41,42,45] AlphaFold is a deep learning algorithm and artificial intelligence program developed by Jumper and his team at DeepMind, a research lab acquired by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc., which performs predictions of protein structure.^[4] In November 2020, AlphaFold was named the winner of the 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, an international competition that benchmarks algorithms to determine which one can best predict the 3D structure of proteins.^[18,4] AlphaFold won the competition, outperforming other algorithms by scoring above 90 for around two-thirds of the proteins in CASP's global distance test (GDT), a test that measures the degree to which a computational program predicted structure is similar to the lab experiment determined structure, with 100 being a complete match within the distance cutoff used for calculating GDT.^[21,22,20] In 2026, Jumper left DeepMind and joined Anthropic.^[13]

In 2021, Jumper was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Biology and Biomedicine".^[14] In 2022, Jumper received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, and for 2023, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing AlphaFold, which accurately predicts the structure of a protein.^[15] In 2023, he was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.^[46,17] In 2024, Jumper and Demis Hassabis shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their protein folding predictions, with the other half going to David Baker for computational protein design.^[41,42]

In 2025, Jumper received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Marshall Medal of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission.^[47,48] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) that same year.^[49] In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.