Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist and the Director of the White House's National Economic Council for President Barack Obama. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics and was Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Clinton Administration.

Summers also served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty that resulted in part from Summers' conflict with Cornel West, conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in the top levels of academia is due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end." Summers has also been criticized by some liberals for the economic policies he advocated as Treasury Secretary and in later writings. Since returning to government in the Obama administration, he has come under fire for his numerous financial ties to Wall Street.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, Summers was born into a Jewish family, the son of two economists, Robert Summers and Anita Summers, who are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of Robert Summers, who, following an older brother's example, changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (Anita Summers's brother). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.