Susan Sumner

Susan Sumner, PhD, is a Professor of Nutrition and Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, leading the Metabolomics and Exposome Laboratory (MEL) at the Nutrition Research Institute (NRI). She specializes in personalized medicine and precision nutrition, leveraging metabolomics and exposome technologies to identify biomarkers for disease prediction, treatment monitoring, and intervention strategies.

Education: Dr. Sumner earned a B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from North Carolina State University, followed by postdoctoral research at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

Research Interests: Her work focuses on metabolic perturbations linked to drugs, environmental chemicals, and dietary intake, with applications in maternal/child health, diabetes, toxicology, cancer, microbiome, and addiction. Key tools include untargeted metabolomics to study interactions between exposures and health outcomes.

Grants & Leadership: She directs NIH-funded cores such as the Metabolomics Core of the Nutrition Obesity Resource Center and the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics and Clinical Assay Center. Recent grants include a 2022 award for predicting dietary responses and a 2019 grant for cardiovascular disease biomarkers.

Labs & Teams: The Sumner Lab employs techniques like 700 MHz NMR spectroscopy and collaborates with global consortia. Key projects include the Human Cancer Metabolome Atlas and the NIH Nutrition for Precision Health Consortium.

Future Work: Ongoing efforts aim to integrate metabolomics with AI for precision health, develop exposome analysis tools, and advance biomarker discovery for personalized interventions.