Jeffrey Cummings
Jeffrey L. Cummings, director of the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, will give this semester's Distinguished Neuroscience Lecture Thursday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. in Room 302 of the University of Wyoming Classroom Building.
Cummings' lecture, "Alzheimer's Disease: Advances in Understanding and Treatment," will summarize his prodigious experience and knowledge of the disease. Cummings is also a professor of neurotherapeutics and drug development for the Cleveland Clinic's Neurological Institute.
Each semester, UW brings a highly qualified lecturer to campus to promote neuroscience education and raise the profile of the university's Neuroscience Center and graduate program. Bruce Culver, chair of UW's Division of Pharmaceutical Sciences and a professor of pharmacology, and Bill Flynn, UW Graduate Neuroscience Program director, started the series in 2008.
A native of Basin and a UW graduate, Cummings received his M.D. from the University of Washington School of Medicine, where he studied neurology and psychiatry. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1980 where he directed UCLA's Dementia and Neurobehavior Research Fellowship for more than 15 years. While at UCLA, Cummings served as director of the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research and the Deane F. Johnson Center for Neurotherapeutics.
Cummings, who received an honorary degree from UW last spring, has written and/or edited 20 books, more than 450 peer-reviewed papers, and some 170 chapters in books. He is the author of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), which is the most commonly used tool for characterizing behavioral disturbances in dementia syndromes and for measuring the effect of therapies on neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. He was awarded the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry's Distinguished Scientist Award in 2010.
