Best to You, Dr Cummings . . .

Psychiatric Times bids a very fond farewell to our long-time board member Jeffrey L. Cummings, MD, who was the originator of the Psychiatric Times “Brain and Behavior” column, which he penned for several years.

He continues to wear a considerable number of professional “hats.” He is director of the Deane F. Johnson Center for Neurotherapeutics at UCLA; director of the UCLA Alzheimer’s Disease Center; the Augustus S. Rose Professor of Neurology; and professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr Cummings has had a long-standing interest in identifying and treating neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, particularly Alzheimer disease and other dementias.

After growing up in Basin, Wyo, Cummings went to the University of Wyoming and then on to medical school at the University of Washington in Seattle. There he worked with epileptologist John Green, MD, who encouraged Cummings to think about the relationship between neuroscience and society. After medical school, Cummings completed a rotating internship at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, followed by a residency in neurology and a fellowship in behavioral neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. It was there that Cummings met neurologist D. Frank Benson, MD, whose 1975 book Psychiatric Aspects of Neurological Disease became a classic in the neuropsychiatric literature.

Jeff is an amazingly prolific writer, with over 20 authored and/or edited books, more than 450 peer-reviewed papers, and some 170 book chapters to his credit. Among his more recent books are Dementia: A Global Approach (with E. S. Krishnamoorthy and M. J. Prince); and the Concise Guide to Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Neurology (with Michael R. Trimble).

For all his accomplishments and accolades, Jeff has a remarkable humility and generosity of spirit that we will miss at Psychiatric Times. We know we will hear much more from him as he pursues his research, and we wish him the very best.