Before moving to BIDMC/HMS, Cummings was the William Patterson Timmie Professor and chair of the department of biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia from 2006 to 2015.
[citation needed] Cummings was professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Georgia in Athens from 1983-1992 and associate director of the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center.
[citation needed] Cummings was a co-founder in 2002, along with Rodger P. McEver and Richard Alvarez, of Selexys Pharmaceuticals Corporation, where he initially served as president and chief scientific officer.
[1] The purchase occurred following receipt of results of the SUSTAIN study, a Phase II trial evaluating the use of SelG1, an anti-P-selectin antibody, in the reduction of vaso-occlusive pain crises in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD).
[2] Cummings was also a co-founder in 2014 of Tetherex Pharmaceuticals, a spinoff of Selexys in Oklahoma City, that is developing novel first-in-class therapeutics targeting cell adhesion proteins in inflammatory and oncologic diseases.
Cummings is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2014),[4] member of Sigma Xi (2020) and a past President of the Society for Glycobiology (2001).
Cummings is the director of the National Center for Functional Glycomics,[9] which relocated in 2015 from Emory to BIDMC/HMS, and develops and offers a variety of glycan microarray technologies for researchers in the field.