Photo: John Sears, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Demis Hassabis
Chairman, Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist, Alphabet
Google DeepMind (opens in a new tab)London, United Kingdom
Co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and led it through AlphaGo and AlphaFold; shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI-driven protein-structure prediction. In August 2026 he stepped back from Google DeepMind's day-to-day leadership to become its chairman and Alphabet's first chief scientist, while continuing to lead the AI drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs.
Research background
Hassabis studied computer science at Cambridge and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, after an earlier career designing video games including Theme Park. He co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010; Google acquired it in 2014, and it became the centre of Google's AI research.
Under his leadership DeepMind produced AlphaGo, the first program to beat a world champion at Go, and AlphaFold, which solved the long-standing problem of predicting protein structure from sequence - the work that earned him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Google DeepMind's day-to-day operations are now run by CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, who reports to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Research and public work
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