Scott Shirley is a former Penn State football player who founded Uplifting Athletes, a full service national nonprofit foundation serving a rare disease community.

Scott attended Penn State University where he studied engineering and played football for the Nittany Lions. During his senior year, Scott’s father was diagnosed with kidney cancer, a very rare form of cancer. Scott and his Nittany Lions football teammates turned an annual weightlifting competition into a fundraiser to raise money to fight this more rare form of cancer.

Scott and his teammates saw an opportunity for student-athletes to use their popularity to promote awareness and raise funds for rare diseases. The core mission of Uplifting Athletes is to ally college football with rare diseases and raise them as a national priority through outreach, research, education and advocacy by the college football teams.

Scott is currently the Chairman of the Board for Uplifting Athletes and became the full time Executive Director during in 2007.