PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Russ Bates

Russ Bates is a researcher whose work includes AlphaFold, the DeepMind system that predicts protein structures. His papers from 2017 cover blood vessels in microscopy images. In November 2020, he was credited among the researchers behind AlphaFold when it reached a median score of 92.4 GDT in the 14th CASP assessment. In July 2021, he coauthored two Nature papers: the AlphaFold paper, which credits him with the network architecture and training, and the human proteome paper, which covered 98.5% of human proteins. In September 2024, he coauthored the AlphaProteo report on designing protein binders.

Works
6
Citations
50,654
h-index
5
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Blood-vessel imaging papers

    In 2017, he is first author of "Segmentation of vasculature from fluorescently labeled endothelial cells in multi-photon microscopy images" in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and of an arXiv paper, "Extracting 3D vascular structures from microscopy images using convolutional recurrent networks".

  2. November 2020

    AlphaFold at CASP14

    DeepMind's AlphaFold system achieves a median score of 92.4 GDT across all targets in the 14th CASP assessment, released in November 2020. He is among the researchers credited with the system.

  3. July 2021

    The AlphaFold paper in Nature

    In July 2021, Nature publishes "Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold", and he is one of the DeepMind authors who contribute equally to it. The paper credits him with developing the neural network architecture and training, and with the data, analytics and inference systems.

  4. July 2021

    AlphaFold across the human proteome

    A second Nature paper in July 2021, "Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome", applies AlphaFold to 98.5% of human proteins. He is credited among the authors who develop the network and the infrastructure used to run it across the proteome.

  5. September 2024

    The AlphaProteo report

    In September 2024, he is a coauthor of the AlphaProteo technical report, "De novo design of high-affinity protein binders with AlphaProteo". The report describes machine learning models for protein design that reach 3- to 300-fold better binding affinities than the best existing methods on seven target proteins.

Most-cited works

  1. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold2021 · Nature · 43,443 citationsWith Alex Bridgland, Alexander Pritzel, Andrew W. Senior, Anna Potapenko, Augustin Žídek and Bernardino Romera-Paredes
  2. Protein complex prediction with AlphaFold-Multimer2021 · 3,783 citationsWith Alex Bridgland, Alexander Pritzel, Andrew W. Senior, Anna Potapenko, Augustin Žídek and Demis Hassabis
  3. Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome2021 · Nature · 3,006 citationsWith Alex Bridgland, Alexander Pritzel, Andrew W. Senior, Anna Potapenko, Augustin Žídek and Bernardino Romera-Paredes
  4. Applying and improving AlphaFold at CASP142021 · Proteins Structure Function and Bioinformatics · 397 citationsWith Alex Bridgland, Alexander Pritzel, Andrew W. Senior, Anna Potapenko, Augustin Žídek and Bernardino Romera-Paredes
  5. De novo design of high-affinity protein binders with AlphaProteo2024 · 60 citationsWith Andrew W. Senior, Demis Hassabis, Josh Abramson, Pushmeet Kohli, Rob Fergus and Simon Kohl

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Russ Bates. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Russ Bates - Google Scholar scholar.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology — Google DeepMind deepmind.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold | Nature nature.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome | Nature nature.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. De novo design of high-affinity protein binders with AlphaProteo arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.