Pushmeet Kohli, the head of research (AI for science, robustness and reliability) at DeepMind, was a computer science student. After working at Microsoft Research for eleven years, Kohli joined DeepMind.
Predicting protein structures has long been considered one of the truly difficult problems in computational biology, and AlphaFold has made extraordinary progress over the past year or two. Kohli has contributed highly to this state-of-the-art AI system for predicting the 3D structure of proteins. It was the most cited paper in 2021.
Over 1.7 million researchers across 190 countries have used it for diverse research, from designing plastic-eating enzymes to developing more effective malaria vaccines. “This is just the beginning,” Kohli envisions AI would eventually lead to the creation of a virtual cell, which could revolutionise biomedical research by allowing biology to be studied in-silico rather than in physical labs.