Saturday, April 27, 2024

One of Bucknell's most prominent scholars, Craig has a very diverse background in the geologic sciences and is one the country's leading geomorphologists, with significant contributions in hillslope, coastal, and fluvial processes. He has authored over fifty scientific papers and several books, including the top-ranked textbook Process Geomorphology. Craig not only helped create the the Susquehanna River Initiative in 2005, he also served as a faculty director of the Environmental Center, where he grew its vision and mission, emphasizing teaching, scholarship, and outreach. He remains a principle scientist in the River Initiative, contributing to its scholarship with new ideas and opportunities for collaborative research and with his colleagues on campus and across the world.

A passionate scholar, Craig spends countless hours with students running physical modeling experiments in his flume laboratory or mapping and collecting data in watersheds throughout the United States and New Zealand. He continues to generate seminal findings on the impact of flooding and land use on stream channels. This work spans a geologic time scale, from the evolution of the Susquehanna drainage network, to glaciation and paleofloods during the Pleistocene, to the impact of logging, canal building, agriculture, and historical floods.

Over the past three decades at Bucknell and at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Craig has taught over a dozen watershed-related courses, but he is perhaps most proud of the ones he developed as part of the Susquehanna River Initiative. Having taught the first Natural History of the Susquehanna course in the mid-1990s, Craig was a lead instructor for the first Bucknell on the Susquehanna, a semester-long field intensive experience from the headwaters to the Chesapeake. He also developed new courses on Stream Restoration and Watershed System Sciences.

Frequently presenting the accomplishments of the River Initiative at regional and national meeting of scientific and engineering organizations, including the Geological Society of America (GSA), where he has served in leadership roles. He serves in scholarly roles with a number of agencies and watershed groups, including the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, Susquehanna River Heartland Coalition for Environmental Studies, U.S. Geological Survey, and Department of Environmental Protection.

Craig is also an avid birder, paddler, gardener, and photographer.