Craig Edward DeForest (born August 13, 1968) is an American solar physicist and the Chair of the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division. 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 Kankelb