Craig Edward DeForest

Craig Edward DeForest (born August 13, 1968) is an American solar physicist. He leads the heliophysics research group at the Boulder, Colorado offices of the Southwest Research Institute and holds an adjunct faculty position at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of experimental astrophysics of the Sun include: early work on the MSSTA, a sounding rocket that prototyped modern normal-incidence EUV optics such as are used on the Solar Dynamics Observatory; his discovery of sound waves in the solar corona in 1998; standardization of computer vision techniques that are used to measure and track magnetic fields on the solar surface; co-invention with colleague Charles Kankelborg of the fluxon semi-Lagrangian approach to numerical MHD modeling; and pioneering work on quantitative remote sensing of the solar wind via Thomson scattered light.. He leads the development of a space mission, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), that was selected for detailed study by NASA's Heliophysics Division in 2017 .

DeForest is noted outside the heliophysics science community for his contributions to open-source software, in particular PDL and Audacity; and for his extensive work on science outreach to the public. He was the Press Officer of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division from 1999 to 2016, when he stepped down, to be replaced by Henry "Trae" Winter.