Martha Sommer studied microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin and earned a PhD in Biochemistry from Oregon Health & Science University in 2006. Her doctoral work established fluorescence-based methods to study protein interactions in signal transduction and earned an NSF International Fellowship to further this work in the laboratory of Klaus Peter Hoffmann at the Charité in Berlin. She established her own research group in 2013 and founded the COST Action ERNEST in 2019.
She now leads a team at ISAR Bioscience in Munich developing next-generation tools for GPCR drug discovery.