Summer Gibbs received her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering under the direction of Dr. Brian W. Pogue at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2008. During her doctoral work she studied noninvasive fluorescence technologies and tissue light transport for brain cancer detection and cancer therapy monitoring.

Dr. Gibbs completed her postdoctoral training in the Center for Molecular Imaging at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard Medical School under Dr. John V. Frangioni. Dr. Gibbs was promoted to Instructor in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School in July 2011. During her postdoctoral training she worked on applications of combinatorial solid phase synthesis for the development of unique fluorophore technology for image-guided surgery, development of a method for simultaneous tissue immunofluorescence staining with gold standard hematoxylin and eosin, high throughput screening technologies to improve cancer detection and treatment, and translation of instrumentation and contrast agents for image-guided surgery clinical trials.

Dr. Gibbs joined the faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Oregon Health & Science University as Assistant Professor in June 2012. She also has cross appointments in the Knight Cancer Institute and OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine. She was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2017. Her laboratory focuses on novel fluorescent probe development for improved macroscopic and microscopic imaging applications with special focus on tissue- and disease-specific fluorophores for image-guided surgery, methods for multicolor microscopy and fluorescent technologies to predict therapeutic efficacy for personalized medicine.