George Baker Cummins (August 29, 1904 – March 30, 2007) was a notable American mycologist and was considered an authority on the rust fungi.
Cummins professional specialty for almost his entire career was the taxonomy, biology and geographic distribution of the rust fungi.
His investigations of the rusts took him to the Philippines, New Guinea, continental China, the Himalaya, central and western Africa, and North and South America.
Cummins began his mycological career at the age of 23 as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1927, meaning he was a mycologist for 80 years.
Cummins was never a student of Arthur's although he gained a wealth of knowledge of rust fungi while working with him on the manual.
He served as curator of the Arthur from 1938 - 1971 and built it to be one of the largest working collections of plant rust fungi in the world.
Several other universities also awarded him honorary degrees including the Banco Nacional of Mexico which named him "Mencion honorifica" in 1982.
In the summers during his college years Cummins and a classmate friend from Darby worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the barberry eradication program for control of stem rust of wheat.
One of the botany professors at MSC was Frank B. Cotner, a student of the mycologist C. H. Kauffman at the University of Michigan.
Cotner was impressed by Cummins and urged him to consider graduate work in mycology and helped him get an assistantship with Kauffman at Michigan.
He went to Purdue in January 1930 to assume a position on the Agricultural Experiment Station staff as a research assistant.
In summer 1957 Cummins spent several weeks collecting rust fungi in the Chiricahua Mountains and adjacent areas in southeastern Arizona, working out of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History.
In 1960 he spent a sabbatical year in Tucson doing field research on rusts in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
[9] Cummins has been noted as the best softball pitcher in the Purdue University School of Agriculture[5] and a man of dry wit, who signed his letters "the burned-out botanist" (Mccain & Hennen, 1993).