Panagis obtained his BSc. in Chemistry from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. He carried out his doctoral studies in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Michigan with Prof. Dimitri Coucouvanis and received his PhD in 2004. He moved to Oxford University in the UK at the Structural Genomics Consortium where he focused on protein crystallography and biophysics, first as a postdoctoral scientist until 2007, then as a Team Leader until 2011. In December 2011 he received a Research Career Development Fellowship Award from the Wellcome Trust and took a post as a Principal Investigator at the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford University. In November 2012 he became an affiliate of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) in Oxford. His research interest is focused on structural comparisons of entire protein families and the discovery of shared and distinct mechanisms that determine substrate recognition and protein regulation, as well as the structure-guided design of specific inhibitors that modulate the function of proteins involved in epigenetic signaling, aiming to target them in disease.