Martha E. Som­mer stud­ied micro­bi­o­logy at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Aus­tin and received her PhD in Bio­chem­istry from the Ore­gon Health & Sci­ence Uni­ver­sity. Her doc­toral work in the labor­at­ory of Prof. David L. Far­rens estab­lished sens­it­ive fluor­es­cence-based meth­ods to observe pro­tein inter­ac­tion dynam­ics in sig­nal trans­duc­tion. This early work set the found­a­tion for many key dis­cov­er­ies regard­ing how arrestins reg­u­late the thera­peut­ic­ally import­ant G pro­tein-coupled recept­ors (GPCRs). In 2007 she was awar­ded a fel­low­ship from the National Sci­ence Found­a­tion (USA) to con­tinue these stud­ies with Prof. Klaus-Peter Hof­mann at the Char­ité Med­ical Uni­ver­sity in Ber­lin, Ger­many. Since 2013 she led her own research group at the Char­ité, and in 2019 she estab­lished the European Research Net­work on Sig­nal Trans­duc­tion (ERN­EST) that is fun­ded by COST (European Cooper­a­tion in Sci­ence and Technology).

In 2021, Martha Som­mer joined ISAR Bioscience to estab­lish the new Sig­nalling Plat­form. She and her team are devel­op­ing fit-for-pur­pose tools and approaches to sup­port the next gen­er­a­tion of GPCR drug discovery.