Brian Cummings Email & Phone Number

Dr. Cummings is a Professor in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Anatomy & Neurobiology at UC Irvine. He is also a member of Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Reseach Center (a CIRM Institute) and the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND). He has 20 years experience in small animal models of neurodegeneration and neurotrauma and 10 years experience with neural stem cell transplantation in the CNS including microsurgery, behavior assessment, stereology of cell survival & fate, electron microscopy and regulatory affairs. He is Associate Director of Infrastructure for the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Center and Director of an Olympus Live Cell imaging suite for time-lapse confocal imaging. His research focuses on the investigation of the mechanisms of recovery mediated by human stem cell transplantation after neurotrauma. His lab is interested in factors affecting the survival, engraftment, migration, and differentiation of stem cells both in animal models and in cell culture systems. His work contributed to the pre-clinical data package ending in the FDA approval for a fetal derived human neural stem cell trial in the myelination disorder Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD), and SwissMedic approval for the treatment of chronic, thoracic spinal cord injuries in collaboration with StemCells Inc (Newark, CA). He is also the PI on a CIRM Early Translation Award investigating the potential use of human ES-derived neural stem cells in contusion induced traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Listed skills include Cell Culture, Stem Cells, Animal Models, Confocal Microscopy, and 17 others.