Eric B. Cummings is the founder of CoolEarth Solar, a company dedicated to making solar farming economically competitive; and the founder and CEO of LabSmith, Inc., a company that has sold logic and timing controllers and sequencers, high-voltage sequencers, motorized video microscopes, and other laboratory products internationally since 1997.

Dr. Cummings worked from 1997 to 2005 at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA, where he established the Applied Microfluidics Physics Laboratory. At Sandia, Dr. Cummings was principal investigator on six Laboratory-Directed Research and Development projects, two of which received the top honors at the laboratory, a first for Sandia. Dr. Cummings has five issued patents and nine pending, ranging from spread-spectrum barcodes which can indicate minute amounts of tamper to micro-fabricated dielectrophoretic sorters of cells, bacteria, and viruses. Dr. Cummings' refereed publications in microfluidics include two foundational scientific discoveries: the theory of ideal electrokinesis and the methodology of insulator-based dielectrophoresis.

Dr. Cummings earned his Ph.D. in 1995 from Caltech in Aeronautics and Chemistry, winning the top Caltech honor, the Francis Clauser prize awarded "for opening new avenues of human thought and endeavor," and Caltech's William H Ballhaus Prize for his thesis "Laser-induced thermal acoustics," in which he invented a new laser diagnostic technique for remotely and nonintrusively measuring the thermophysical properties of gases. He earned his M.S. degree in 1989 from Caltech in Aeronautics and his B.S. degree from Penn State University in 1989 in Engineering Science, which provided a diverse and deep foundation for multi-disciplinary research and development.

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