Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of research at Google DeepMind, where he heads the Science and Strategic Initiatives Unit. He has led AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve and other projects that apply AI to biology, mathematics and code.
Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of research at Google DeepMind, where he heads the Science and Strategic Initiatives Unit. He has led AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve and other projects that apply AI to biology, mathematics and code.
Kohli earned a Bachelor of Technology in computer science and engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Warangal. He then completed a PhD in computer vision at Oxford Brookes University in 2007, supervised by Philip Torr; the thesis won the British Machine Vision Association's Sullivan Prize for the best PhD thesis. After the PhD he was a postdoctoral associate at the Psychometric Centre of the University of Cambridge.
Kohli then moved to Microsoft Research, where he became partner scientist and director of research. His research has spanned computer vision, program synthesis, discrete optimization and psychometrics, including human pose estimation with the Kinect and predicting personality from online networks. His papers won best paper awards at the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2010 and the International World Wide Web Conference in 2014.
Kohli joined Google DeepMind in 2017. There he has led or supervised AlphaFold, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins; AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent; SynthID, which watermarks and detects AI-generated content; and Co-Scientist, an agent that generates and tests scientific hypotheses. Other projects include AlphaTensor, AlphaCode, FunSearch, AlphaMissense and AlphaGenome. Time named him to its Time 100 AI list. The Inference reported in September 2026, when Google opened a 9-billion-variant DNA atlas, that Kohli highlighted a score for ranking genetic variants.
Sources · written 16 October 2026