Brian Cummings earned a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Philosophy concurrently from the University of Illinois. He was awarded his doctorate in Psychobiology from UC Irvine (before UCI changed the name to Neurobiology & Behavior), followed by two years as an Instructor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. He joined the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 2002 to work on animal models of neurodegeneration and neurotrauma.

Dr. Cummings is an internationally recognized expert on animal models of acute and chronic traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SCI), neuroinflammation, and repeat-mild concussions. He served as Vice-Chair for Research in PM&R for 10 years before being appointed as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. In 2025, he was promoted to Senior Associate Dean in the School of Medicine and co-Director of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.

In collaboration with Dr. Aileen Anderson and StemCells Inc, his work contributed to the pre-clinical data package leading to 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 using fNSCs. He is PI on a CIRM TRAN award investigating the use of human ES-derived neural stem cells in contusion-induced traumatic brain injury (TBI). In the fall of 2025, he filed a pre-IND with the FDA for a Shef-6-based human neural stem cell (hNSC) therapy for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

Over his career, he has been awarded more than $50 million in funding, and he is an author on more than 100 publications. In his spare time, he enjoys skiing, mountain biking, and riding horses (both English and Western).