Craig W. Osenberg Professor Osenberg graduated with highest honors from the University of California Santa Barbara (BA, Biological Sciences, 1980), and later completed his graduate studies at the Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University (PhD, 1988). He went on to post-doctoral and research appointments at UC Santa Barbara and in 1992 joined the faculty at UC Berkeley. In 1995 he moved to the University of Florida, where he also served as Graduate Coordinator and Department Chair. Craig joined the University of Georgia in 2014, where he holds an endowed Professorship in Ecology in the Odum School of Ecology, and has served as head of the Promotion and Tenure unit. (2016-2019) the Graduate Coordinator (2019-2025).
His research in population and community ecology tackles problems across a diversity of habitats (terrestrial, freshwater, estuarine, and marine) and organisms (fish, amphibians, plants, invertebrates), but is organized around several interrelated research themes: (1) population dynamics, especially the role of stage-structure and the effects of density dependence; (2) the development and application of statistical tools designed to quantify impacts of human activities on ecological systems (including marine reserves); (3) the development and application of meta-analysis and quantitative synthesis; and (4) coral reef dynamics, especially the role of species interactions (including mutualisms) on the growth and survival of corals and the resulting feedbacks on coral-associated organisms. These projects have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, NSF IGERT program, Sea Grant, French-American Cultural Exchange, the Marsden Fund of New Zealand, and the European Union. He and his students have published over 190 peer-reviewed papers.
Professor Osenberg was elected a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2015. He also was Chair of the Aquatic Section of ESA and Editor-in-Chief of Oecologia, and has served on the editorial boards of Ecology, Ecological Monographs and Frontiers in Marine Science. He has served as a consultant and advisor to a diversity of groups applying science to important environmental issues, including impacts of a power plant in coastal California, the design and assessment of marine protected areas in Costa Rica and the Mediterranean, and restoration of the Everglades and the Gulf of Mexico.