Dr. Scott Summers is a leading metabolic biologist whose work has fundamentally reshaped understanding of lipid signaling in cardiometabolic disease. He is a Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Integrative Physiology, and William J. Rutter Presidential Endowed Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Utah. He also serves as Co-Executive Director of the University of Utah Center for Metabolic Health, alongside Distinguished Professor and HHMI Investigator Jared Rutter. Over more than two decades, Dr. Summers has advanced the paradigm that sphingolipids—particularly ceramides—are not passive byproducts of metabolism, but active drivers of insulin resistance and organ dysfunction across the heart, kidney, liver, and skeletal muscle. His discoveries helped establish ceramides as clinically actionable biomarkers and therapeutic targets, influencing both academic research and clinical practice worldwide. Dr. Summers’ work has been published in leading journals including Science, Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and has been cited more than 23,000 times. In 2015, Dr. Summers co-founded Centaurus Therapeutics, a biotechnology company has initiated clinical trials with a novel ceramide-lowering therapeutic to treat diabetes, heart failure, and kidney disease.

Prior to joining the University of Utah, Dr. Summers held faculty and leadership positions at Duke University and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Australia, and Colorado State University. He earned his B.S. in Biochemistry from Indiana University, his Ph.D. in Physiology from Southern Illinois University, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania.