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Demis Hassabis, the British computer scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday (Oct 9), has a Google connection. He is the cofounder of the company DeepMind, which was acquired by the tech behemoth.

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Hassabis, who shared the Nobel with Professor John Jumper, and US-based Professor David Baker for their work on proteins, has an impressive bio.

Hassabis and Jumper were able to map the structure of proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life, with accuracy through the AI tool they developed, called AlphaFold2.

Also read: Explained: What is microRNA? Discovery awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine

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The Nobel committee described the innovation as a "complete revolution" that helped in the study of 200 million proteins worldwide. Their work will help in developing treatments for antibiotic resistance, understanding enzyme behaviour, and creating vaccines.

Also read: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton

Demis Hassabis: Chess prodigy to Nobel laureate

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Demis Hassabis, 48, was a child chess prodigy.

Born to Greek-Cypriot and Singaporean parents, he grew up in London and became a chess master when he was 13.

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Before Nobel, the Cambridge University graduate won numerous awards for his work in computer game design.

Hassabis, who graduated in computer science, worked in various American universities after getting his PhD from University College London.

In 2010, he cofounded the machine learning company DeepMind that was acquired by tech giant Google in 2014.

DeepMind combines neuroscience and machine learning to solve various problems. It was in news in 2016, when its AlphaGo programme beat a human Go player Lee Sedol, a world champion, in a five-game match.

(With inputs from agencies)