Craig ZumBrunnen  (B.A. cum laude in Geology, University of Minnesota, 1966; M.S. in Geological Sciences, California Institute of Technology, 1968; Ph.D. in Geography, University of California at Berkeley in 1973) is Co-Director, Program on the Environment (PoE) and Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. He is also a member of the faculty of both the Russian East European and Central Asian Studies Program (REECAS) and the Middle East Center (MEC) of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. 

Craig served on the faculty of the Ohio State University from 1972-77, and as the Honors Program Coordinator and Graduate Program Coordinator for the UW Department of Geography.  He has traveled and conducted research within the Russian Federation and the Newly Independent States (NIS) for over 30 years. 

He has been a consultant on several projects dealing with environmental, energy, water, natural resource, and environmental management issues and problems in Russia and the NIS, beginning in 1975 as a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency teams under the auspices of the USA-USSR Environmental Accord on river basin modeling for pollution control.  Professor ZumBrunnen is co-author of The Soviet Iron and Steel Industry, and editor and co-translator of Urban Geography in the Soviet Union and the United States. 

Craig has received research grants and contracts funded by Battelle, Digital Equipment Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (NCSEER), the National Science Foundation (NSF), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and the US EPA and Department of Energy. 

He is currently a co-PI on the new five-year, NSF-funded, Integrative Graduate Education & Research Training (IGERT) program in Urban Ecology at the University of Washington. 

His published research has focused on Soviet and post-Soviet natural resource management problems, including environmental quality problems, water pollution, mineral resource development, regional economic development, energy resource research and development, urban geography and urban ecology.  His most recent publications have dealt with knowledge-based water quality modeling, the role of non-governmental organizations in social change within Russia and the NIS, topics associated with post-Soviet social and economic transformation processes, the use of information technology for both governmental and NGO resource management institutional capacity building, and the development of environmental information networks in Russia. 

He was selected as a participant in the University of Washington’s first Institute for Teaching Excellence in 1999 and received the University of Washington, Department of Geography’s Excellence in Undergraduate Education Award in June 2000.  He has had a long-term commitment to efforts, which promote international, environmental, transdisciplinary, and experiential and team-taught curricula.  Currently, he teaches courses in physical geography, problems and methods of resource management, mathematical modeling, problems of Russian resource management, renewable energy and urban ecology.