Michael R. Cummings is a Research Professor in the Department of Biological, Chemical, and Physical Sciences at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois. For more than 25 years, he was a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences and in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also served on the faculties of Northwestern University and Florida State University. He received his B.A. from St. Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He has written textbooks in human genetics and general biology. His research interests center on the molecular organization and physical mapping of the heterochromatic regions of human acrocentric chromosomes.