Geoffrey Cumming

Geoffrey Cumming is an economist and businessman whose philanthropic efforts have benefited health initiatives and medical research facilities around the world, including the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. His forward-thinking donations have made possible important research in the fields of neurology, microbiology and virology.

Geoffrey Alexander Cumming was born on October 30, 1951, in Kingston, Ontario. He often talks about having been lucky throughout his life, and he may be right: his parents defied the odds by even meeting. His father was born in Bashaw while his mother was born in Vermont. During World War II, his father served as a navigation instructor in the Air Force. As part of those duties, he was transferred to the Bahamas, a trip that involved a one-day stopover in Montreal. While there, he happened to meet Geoff’s mother, and they fell instantly in love. “They only saw each other 3 times before they were married,” Geoff says, “but they carried on this love affair with hundreds of letters.”

Geoff’s parents held traditional values and impressed upon him the benefits of a solid family life, the value of a university education and the importance of living in a good society and making valuable contributions to it. He was fascinated by science and considered pursuing it academically, but he was ultimately more drawn to the British concept of PPE – “politics, philosophy and economics,” the essentials of a “good society.” He earned a BA in Economics from the University of Calgary, graduating first in his class. His supervisor, a graduate of the London School of Economics, submitted an application to that school in Geoff’s name without his knowledge, and he was accepted.

Upon returning to Canada, Geoff spent a little time as an instructor at the University of Alberta and, starting in 1976, a tax policy advisor in the Alberta Treasury Department. In 1978, he joined the Department of Federal and Intergovernmental Affairs doing work in international economics, including creating tariff-free access for Canadian petrochemicals into the United States. That job put him in frequent contact with the colourful American trade negotiator Harald Malmgren, who felt Geoff’s talents would be well-suited to the private sector. He pointed Geoff toward the Royal Bank, at the time the world’s largest energy bank. The company had just set up what they called the “Global Energy Group,” a team charged with providing sophisticated risk analysis of their various ventures, and thanks to Malmgren’s recommendation, Geoff was hired.

He rose quickly through the ranks and in 1985, he joined the investment dealer Peters & Co. as head of mergers and acquisitions. While there, he sold an oil company to George Gardiner, the Toronto businessman and philanthropist sometimes referred to as “the Canadian Warren Buffett.” Once again, Geoff would be the beneficiary of a fortuitous meeting, as Gardiner invited him to become president and CEO of Gardiner Oil & Gas. In 1992, he became CEO of its parent company, the global investment concern Gardiner Group Capital Limited.

Geoff likes to divide his life into thirds. The first third, he says, was basically “education and getting started.” The middle third was hard work. And at the age of 60, he began a new third: giving back to society.

Geoff says he had not been especially philanthropical in his younger days, but in his 60s he found his priorities shifting. He had gotten married for the first time, to Anna Algard, and his father had passed away. He felt an urge to honour his parents and their strong belief in the betterment of society in some way. He began by becoming a major donor to the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST), an initiative to devise simple, localized systems to provide communities with clean drinking water.

Geoff’s philanthropic career was just getting started. In June 2014, he made a major donation to the University of Calgary — it was then the largest-ever single donation to a Canadian university. (He also convinced then-premier Alison Redford to supply a matching grant, effectively doubling the size of his gift.) Geoff says he did not realize at the time how significant his donation was; he simply wanted the university to have enough money to sustain long-term research over several decades.

“There's no sense in doing short-term things,” he says. “You want to do things that are going to have sustained impact. That's why I focused on a 20-year timeframe. I wanted to look ahead, 20 years into the future.”

Geoff had already been picking the brains of medical professionals around the world, looking for potentially fruitful areas of research, and he soon settled on two particularly critical parts of the body: the brain and the microbiome, the complex collections of microorganisms that live in places like your gut.

“They call it ‘the last frontier of medical science,’” Geoff says. “The university told me they wanted to create a germ-free facility in which to study it. At the time, there was just one such facility, a tiny one in Switzerland. And so, the School of Medicine hired the person from there and set about creating our own Microbiome Centre. And now the University of Calgary School of Medicine’s International Microbiome Centre is the most advanced one in the world.”

The work being done at the Cumming School of Medicine has paid off in many ways, including the discovery of a group of bacteria that appears to be responsible for many ICU infections, and the development of new treatments to suppress them. But there have been intangible benefits as well. As a groundbreaking research hub, the school now attracts some of the top scientific talent to Alberta from around the world. Their presence has further energized the school and inspired other donors who also have or are making major donations.

Vaccine science was also looming large in Geoff’s mind as an urgent field of study. And so, in 2022, Geoff made history again with a major donation to the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia to establish the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics. That was the largest donation ever made in the medical field in Australia. As Geoff explains, the world had been very fortunate that the COVID pathogen was simple enough for scientists to develop a vaccine in a remarkably short period. However, the world is also home to pathogens such as HIV, Ebola, SARS, MERS and many others, which are much more complex organisms. No vaccine has yet been discovered for any of these pathogens, but some may be managed with combinations of drugs, therapeutics, such as the “retroviral cocktail” that many take to manage HIV/AIDS.

For Geoff, the possibility of another pandemic is a major threat facing humanity, which means the development of ways to avoid pandemics, or treating them in the absence of a cure, is an especially urgent task. “What happens if we have another pandemic, but the pathogen is complicated?” he asks. “We may not get a vaccine. We need a back-up plan; we need to develop a therapeutic solution; what might be called ’a second fire department’ to fight a new pandemic. It’s high-risk investing, but it’s extremely important for the world.”

Research Australia recognized Geoff’s support of medical research in 2023 by presenting him with the Great Australian Philanthropy Award.

Over the course of his investment career, Geoff has been a member of more than 35 corporate boards in 6 countries. He was inducted into the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame in 2019. Geoff has sat on the advisory board of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and the board of the Fraser Institute. He is the former governor of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. He has an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Calgary and was made a Fellow of the University of Melbourne in 2024. As an avid mountaineer, Geoff scaled peaks around the world, from Banff and Jasper to Europe, Asia and New Zealand.

“I expect that I'll give away the vast majority of my wealth during my lifetime,” Geoff says. “My first responsibility is to take proper future care for my wife and two children, and everything else will go to top-tier international medical research over the next 30 years. My mother is active and spry at 103, and so over the last third of my life I would like to make important philanthropic moves which enhance our resiliency in this world to prevent pandemics and to support other critical medical research here in Alberta and globally. I believe in the old saying: leave the world a better place than when you came.”