Dr. Jeffrey Cummings

Dubbed one of America’s “Rock Stars of Science” by GQ magazine in 2009, Dr. Jeffrey Cummings is widely hailed as a leading figure in the fight to keep Alzheimer’s disease at bay.

He is the Camille and Larry Ruvo Chair of the Neurological Institute of Cleveland Clinic and was most recently the director of Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. He has contributed extensively to neurological research into Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia and has published over 700 articles and 43 books on these topics.

Over the course of his career as an Alzheimer’s researcher and leader, he has received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the 2018 Bengt Winblad Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research. In 2013, he was ranked third amongst Alzheimer’s disease researchers worldwide. Dr. Cummings is also the creator of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory, a behavioral tool that measures outcomes of dementia-related clinical trials.

"There's probably not a single experiment that I can think of that would be a game changer, but what we desperately need is something like a blood test for Alzheimer's. So I would invest in a program to develop a peripheral marker for the presence of Alzheimer's. That kind of marker would open the door to very important diagnostic and therapeutic advances. So the group of experiments I would perform would be about the presence of biochemical markers in the blood that are diagnostic of the presence of disease in the brain."
-Dr. Jeffrey Cummings