Eric Cummings, Founder

Eric is the founder of Cool Earth Solar and the creator of Cool Earth's technology. He also cofounded and bootstrapped LabSmith, Inc., a company that makes novel electronics for scientific research.

Before Cool Earth, Eric worked at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, where he established the Applied Microfluidics Physics Laboratory. At Sandia, he was principal investigator on six Laboratory-Directed Research and Development projects, two of which received highest honors by the Department of Energy (DOE) for their exceptional scientific advances. Eric has six issued patents and eight pending, ranging from spread-spectrum barcodes, which can indicate minute amounts of tamper, to microfabricated dielectrophoretic sorters of cells, bacteria, and viruses. His refereed publications in microfluidics include two foundational scientific discoveries: the theory of ideal electrokinesis and the methodology of insulator-based dielectrophoresis.

He earned his PhD in 1995 from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Aeronautics and Chemistry, winning the Francis Clauser Prize "for opening new avenues of human thought and endeavor." Eric also was awarded the William H. Ballhaus Prize for his thesis "Laser-induced thermal acoustics," which introduced a new laser diagnostic technique for remotely and nonintrusively measuring the thermophysical properties of gases. He earned his MS in Aeronautics from Caltech and his BS in Engineering Science from Penn State University.

Eric religiously turns off lights and unused computer displays and eschews air conditioning and central heating. By his own admission, he is also an annoying hypermiler in his wife's Prius.