About Us

Welcome to A Summer Renaissance—a space for learning, questioning, and taking a more thoughtful look at the many things that influence our health. I’m Summer, a registered nurse with more than 15 years of experience in healthcare. I hold graduate degrees in nursing administration and business and am currently pursuing doctoral studies with a focus on functional nutrition. My career has taught me a great deal about caring for people when they are sick, but over the years, I’ve become increasingly interested in another question: What can we learn about the everyday factors that influence our health long before illness occurs? That curiosity became much more personal after my own breast cancer diagnosis in 2022. Like many people who experience a major health event, I began looking more closely at my lifestyle, environment, nutrition, and the products I had used for years without giving them much thought. I started asking questions. What are we putting on our skin? What are we breathing inside our homes? What is actually in the food we eat? How do nutrition, sleep, stress, movement, our environment, and our everyday habits work together to influence health? I also realized that healthy living shouldn’t be driven by fear. Everything labeled “natural” isn’t necessarily better, and the presence of a chemical doesn’t automatically mean something is dangerous. Evidence, dose, frequency, individual risk, and context matter. My goal is to explore these topics with curiosity and balance while translating sometimes complicated health information into something useful for everyday life. Who This Blog Is For A Summer Renaissance is for anyone who wants to become more informed and intentional about their health without feeling like they have to completely overhaul their life overnight. Maybe you’ve started reading ingredient labels and wondering what they actually mean. Maybe you’re curious about nutrition, environmental exposures, household products, beauty and personal care, healthy aging, or ways to support your overall well-being. Or maybe, like me, something happened in your life that made you begin asking different questions about your health. You don’t need a healthcare background to be here. You also don’t need to live a perfectly “clean” or holistic lifestyle. This is a space for people who want to learn, question what they’ve always done, understand the evidence, and make realistic choices that work for their lives. Some changes may be small. Others may completely change the way you think about something you’ve been doing for years. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s awareness, education, and having enough information to make choices for yourself. Why “A Summer Renaissance”? A renaissance represents renewal, learning, discovery, and seeing familiar things through a new lens. That is exactly what this season of my life represents. A Summer Renaissance is about becoming more intentional—not perfect. Here, you’ll find conversations about whole-person health, functional nutrition, environmental exposures, food, beauty and personal-care products, home environments, healthy aging, lifestyle choices, and other topics that make me stop and ask, Could this affect our health, and what does the evidence actually say? My nursing background will always influence how I approach health, but this space goes beyond nursing. It is where clinical knowledge, emerging research, personal experience, and real life meet. I’m learning too, and as the evidence changes, I believe our thinking should be willing to change with it. If something you read here makes you curious, encourages you to ask another question, or helps you make a more informed choice about your health and lifestyle, then A Summer Renaissance is doing exactly what I created it to do. Here’s to learning more, living intentionally, and creating our own renaissance—one informed choice at a time. The information shared on A Summer Renaissance is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to replace individualized medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a qualified healthcare professional.