Robert B. Cumming is a writer, editor, and publisher who resides in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is owner and publisher of the Iris Publishing Group, Inc., a small literary publishing company. He formerly was a research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he served in several positions for thirty years. He holds two degrees in biology, with minors in geology and mathematics from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He has a PhD (1964) in cytogenetics and cell biology from the University of Texas in Austin, where he pursued post-doctoral work on chromosomal fine-structure and cell culture. He remains involved in science, particularly in genetics, ecology and evolution.
Cumming’s writing in recent years has focused on poetry and essays. He is active in several regional and national writers’ organizations and has been a workshop leader at various writing workshops. He has published poems and essays in many online and print journals. In 1981 he was founding president of the Society for Risk Analysis, a major scientific society, and editor-in-chief of its publication, Risk Analysis, an international, interdisciplinary scientific journal still published in New York.
He has worked at “day jobs” as a teacher (high school through post-graduate university), engineer, field biologist, molecular geneticist, risk analyst, and editor, among others. He has lived in the Appalachian South since 1964.
