Rate My Professor Nikolaos Sgourakis

Nikolaos G. Sgourakis is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He directs the Mechanistic Molecular Immunology Lab at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute. Sgourakis received his B.Sc. in Biology from the National University of Athens in 2004, M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from the same institution in 2005, and Ph.D. in Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 with a dissertation in molecular biophysics. His postdoctoral training included work in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate David Baker, focusing on computational modeling of protein complex structures using sparse data, and with Adriaan Bax at the National Institutes of Health, exploring biomolecular NMR spectroscopy for viral immune evasion mechanisms. Prior to his current position, he held faculty appointments as Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Sgourakis Lab integrates structural biology methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography, and cryo-electron microscopy with computational modeling, biophysical techniques, and functional assays to decode the atomic-level mechanisms governing peptide repertoire selection and display by Major Histocompatibility Complex molecules, chimeric antigen receptor target recognition, and T cell receptor activation at the immunological synapse. Key publications include the HLA-Shuttle system for enhancing antigen presentation in immunologically cold tumors (Science Advances, 2026), a multiallelic MHC I-binding system for targeting peptide antigens (Nature Biotechnology, 2024), the cryo-EM structure of an MHC-I/TAPBPR peptide-bound intermediate revealing antigen proofreading (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025), and structural principles of peptide-centric chimeric antigen receptor recognition (Science Immunology, 2023). His research has garnered over 5,700 citations and contributes to international Cancer Grand Challenges teams developing T cell-based therapeutics for pediatric solid tumors.