Summer Gibbs has more than 20 years of experience in the field of in vivo fluorescence imaging with expertise in fluorescent contrast agent development and its clinical translation. She completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering under the direction of Brian Pogue, Ph.D. at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2008. She joined Dr. John Frangioni’s Laboratory for her postdoctoral training where I completed three years of postdoctoral training and was promoted to Instructor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Gibbs joined the faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) as an Assistant Professor in June 2012 and was promoted to Professor in July 2022 where she is currently the Douglas Strain Endowed Professor of Biomedical Engineering. The focus of her laboratory is on the development of novel contrast agents to improved macroscopic and microscopic patient-specific imaging with a strong focus on clinical translation.

Over the past ten years she has worked towards the development of a near infrared (NIR) nerve-specific contrast agent for clinical translation to guide surgical procedures, where she and her team have developed first in class small molecule NIR nerve-specific fluorophores. Dr. Gibbs is currently working towards clinical translation of this novel technology to aid in nerve identification and visualization during a variety of surgical procedures.

Dr. Gibbs has also worked to develop novel cyclic immunofluorescence (cyCIF) methods as well as fluorescence labeling methods for therapeutics enabling mapping of proteomic and drug distribution, respectively. Using these imaging tools, she is currently conducting collaborative work to quantify cancer phenotypes, metastatic disease and treatment efficacy.