Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool

Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, 32, was part of the team that developed AlphaFold, a machine-learning method for predicting a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. She also led the team that used AlphaFold to predict and study the structures of all human proteins, data that was made freely available to the scientific community. “If you want to get a detailed understanding of how they work, it’s very helpful to know their structure,” Tunyasuvunakool says of proteins. “Experimental methods exist for solving protein structures, but they can take a long time and are labor intensive. In many cases, AlphaFold can provide good-quality, actionable structural information within minutes.”