Following undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Maverakis continued his scientific training as a medical student at Harvard Medical School and as a Howard Hughes Fellow at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. He then joined the faculty of the University of California, Davis, where he received Early Career Awards from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. He is also the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and a PECASE award, which he received from former President Barack Obama. In 2019, he was elected a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and in 2023 a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

As a basic scientist and translational researcher, his research team is focused on developing novel genetic and analytical approaches to characterize immune responses, especially autoreactive or anti-tumor responses. Another major focus of his research is on characterizing the human glycome and how it is altered in the setting of cancer and autoimmunity. He has taken an interdisciplinary collaborative approach to these projects, which has resulted in various high impact scientific discoveries.

In the clinic, Dr. Maverakis enjoys seeing patients with rare immune-mediated diseases and cancer patients with immunotherapy-responsive cancers. He conducts investigator-initiated NIH-funded clinical trials testing novel therapies for autoinflammatory and autoimmune conditions. He is also the director of the UC Davis Immune Monitoring Shared resource, where he is charged with conducting the ancillary studies for many of the cancer trials conducted at UC Davis.