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Dr. Eric Cummings is the founder of Cool Earth Solar, and creator of technology that enables Cool Earth Solar to develop solar power plants that can generate electricity at prices competitive with current fossil fuel based power plants. Previously, Dr. Cummings founded LabSmith, Inc., a company that specializes in logic and timing controllers and sequencers, high-voltage sequencers, motorized video microscopes, and other laboratory products. 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. | 