Middle East Technical University
New York University
Patrick PérezResearch Director · Google DeepMindResearcher↗
Researcher · Executive
Koray Kavukcuoglu
Google DeepMindSenior Vice President
GoogleChief AI Architect
Kavukcuoglu helped establish DeepMind’s deep-learning program and co-developed DQN, which learned Atari games directly from screen images[1], and WaveNet, which made synthetic speech sound more natural.[2] He now guides the development of Google’s AI models and their integration into its products.[3]
Career & education
Current rolesGoogle DeepMindAug 2026-presentSenior Vice PresidentGoogle2025-presentChief AI Architect
Google DeepMindAug 2026-presentGoogle2025-presentPreviously
NEC2011-2012Research Scientist
CTO2024-Aug 2026
VP of Research2019-2024
Director of Research2018-2019
Research Scientist2012-2018
NEC2011-2012Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations365,178As of Nov 1, '26
citations+7,767Since last snapshot, Oct 1, '26
Updates 2
MoveKoray Kavukcuoglu steps up to lead Google DeepMind
Kavukcuoglu moved from CTO to Senior Vice President, taking operational leadership of Google DeepMind.
August 5, 2026MoveDemis Hassabis becomes Google DeepMind chair as Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up to leadHassabis is moving into long-term strategy and science roles, while Kavukcuoglu takes operational leadership of Google DeepMind as SVP.
August 5, 2026Selected contributions
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
With John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool and others ·Presented AlphaFold 2, predicting proteins' three-dimensional shapes from their sequences.
Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
With Volodymyr Mnih, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller and others ·Presented DQN, learning to play 49 Atari games from screen images and game scores.
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
With David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser and others ·AlphaGo combined neural networks and search to beat a professional Go player.
References
- Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learningarxiv.org
Original coauthored DQN paper; Atari control from raw pixels.
- WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audioarxiv.org
Original coauthored paper; speech judged more natural than prior systems.
- Google — Koray Kavukcuoglublog.google
Official current biography credits deep-learning team founding and generative-model/product integration responsibility.
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Reviewed August 8, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
