- Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine / NYU Langone Health
Dr. Xiangpeng Kong is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where his laboratory sits at the interface of structural biology, protein engineering, and immunology. His research program is unified by a focus on immune recognition and checkpoint regulation — and on translating mechanistic insights into therapeutic strategies.
A central area of Dr. Kong’s work is structure-guided therapeutic development, encompassing HIV vaccine design, antibody structure-function analysis, and the development of PD-1 pathway agonist antibodies as a novel approach to treating autoimmune disease. To pursue these questions, his group employs an integrated toolkit of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), X-ray crystallography, and functional immune assays, enabling a detailed view of how immune molecules interact and how those interactions can be precisely modulated.
