Professor Charlotte Summers is Director of the Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Heart and Lung Research Institute and Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Charlotte is also the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) National Speciality Lead for Critical Care.
Charlotte graduated in both Biomedical Sciences and Medicine from the University of Southampton, and later undertook a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD at the University of Cambridge, alongside specialist clinical training in Respiratory (Cambridge) and Intensive Care Medicine (London). Subsequently, Charlotte was appointed as the UK’s first National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine, and awarded both a Fulbright All-Disciplines Scholar Award and a Wellcome Trust Fellowship for Postdoctoral Clinician Scientists to undertake research at the University of California, San Francisco. Charlotte returned to Cambridge in 2015, where she established a research group focussed on developing insights into the mechanisms underlying acute respiratory distress syndrome that can be translated into therapeutic benefit for patients.
Charlotte made a significant contribution to the global COVID response, advising the UK, German and US governments. As a member of the UK-COVID Therapeutic Advisory Panel, she provided advice to the Chief Medical Officers regarding the therapies that should be investigated in the UK’s nine COVID platform clinical trials, and she now undertakes a similar role for the national influenza clinical trial. Charlotte is the Chief Investigator of HEAL-COVID, a platform clinical trial open at 110 hospital sites across all four nations of the UK that aims to find drug therapies to improve the longer-term clinical outcomes of people who were hospitalised with COVID-19.
