Craig Edward DeForest (born 1968) is an American heliophysicist and the former Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. He is Director of the Department of Solar and Heliospheric Physics at the Boulder, Colorado offices of the Southwest Research Institute. 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;Observation of Quasi-Periodic Compressive Waves in Solar Polar Plumes, Astrophys. J. 501, 217 standardization of computer vision techniques that are used to measure and track magnetic fields on the solar surface;Solar Magnetic Tracking. I. Software Comparison and Recommended Practices, Astrophys. J. 666, 576. co-invention with colleague Charles Kankelborg of the fluxon semi-Lagrangian approach to numerical MHD modeling;Fluxon Modeling of Low-Beta Plasmas, J. Atmospheric & Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 69, 116. and pioneering work on quantitative remote sensing of the solar wind via Thomson scattered light.NASA press release on CME tracking, 2011
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.
DeForest is the Principal Investigator of the PUNCH mission that launched 2025 to study the solar corona and the origin of the solar wind.NASA selects PUNCH, a new mission to study the Sun. Korey Haynes, Astronomy. 21 June 2019.
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