Dr. Cummings is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and member of the Hollings Cancer Center’s Cancer Control Program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) where he has co-led the tobacco control research program since 2011. Before coming to MUSC, he worked at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) in Buffalo, New York, where I was a senior research scientist and Chairman of the Department of Health Behavior. Dr. Cummings formal academic training is in the field of public health sciences having received master’s and PhD degrees in Public Health Education and Health Behavior from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. Dr. Cummings is widely recognized for his research in the fields of tobacco epidemiology, tobacco use behaviors, consumer risk perceptions, tobacco product marketing and tobacco documents. In 2004 with colleagues from Canada, England, and Australia, he co-founded the International Tobacco Control Policy Research Project (ITC), which was the first-ever international cohort study of tobacco use. The ITC Project has produced much of the evidence on the impact of policies such as health warnings, plain packaging, clean indoor air laws, tobacco pricing and now is focused on product regulations influencing the use of cigarettes, e-cigarettes and other tobacco products. Dr. Cummings has authored over 630 peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as contributed to reports for the Office of the Surgeon General, the National Cancer Institute, the Institute of Medicine, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
