Dr. Demis Hassabis is a visionary leader in artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience, internationally recognized for co-founding and directing one of the world's most influential AI research institutions. He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, which he established in London in 2010 before its acquisition by Google in 2014, representing the company's largest European acquisition to date. A former child chess prodigy who completed his A-levels two years early, Hassabis demonstrated exceptional technical talent by designing and coding the multi-million selling simulation game Theme Park at age seventeen. Following graduation with a Double First in Computer Science from Cambridge University, he founded the pioneering video games company Elixir Studios before returning to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, with postdoctoral training at MIT and Harvard.
Hassabis has spearheaded numerous landmark achievements in artificial intelligence, most notably developing AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a world champion at the ancient and complex game of Go, which marked a watershed moment in AI capabilities and demonstrated the potential of reinforcement learning systems. Under his leadership, DeepMind achieved the groundbreaking milestone of solving the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction through AlphaFold2, which accurately predicts the three-dimensional shapes of proteins critical for disease understanding and drug discovery. This work has resulted in the production of structure predictions for over 200 million proteins, nearly every protein known to science, with DeepMind making these freely available through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute. The AlphaFold has been widely recognized as the Breakthrough of the Year 2021 by Science and Method of the Year 2021 by Nature Methods, representing a paradigm shift in computational biology with unprecedented implications for biomedical research.
For his transformative contributions to protein structure prediction using artificial intelligence, Demis Hassabis was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for protein structure prediction, sharing half of the prize with John Jumper, while David Baker received the other half for computational protein design, as recognized by the Nobel Committee and officially announced on October 9, 2024, cementing his place among the most influential scientists of the contemporary era. His research connecting memory with imagination was previously listed among Science journal's top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007, demonstrating his longstanding commitment to bridging neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Hassabis has guided DeepMind to publish over 2000 research papers, including more than two dozen in Nature and Science, establishing new frontiers in general-purpose learning algorithms that continue to advance the field of artificial intelligence. As a five-time winner of the Pentamind World Championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad and Fellow of the Royal Society, he continues to lead ambitious research directions that promise to further revolutionize AI capabilities while addressing fundamental scientific challenges across multiple disciplines.
