Bingman, Craig

Craig has been a little too fascinated with water chemistry since his first experiences with “pH up” and “pH down” at eight years old.  His fish were less enthusiastic about that.  While growing up, he kept a number of freshwater and marine aquariums.  A bit before he received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry for research on the fine structure of DNA, he was reading USENET articles on marine aquariums using the fancy new “internet.” He realized that there could be an interesting synergy between his profession and the aquarium hobby. Soon after moving to New York, he fell in with a group of dedicated coralholics, who self-identified as the New York Reef Mafia.  Terry Siegel suggested that he might write something for the magazine Aquarium Frontiers. The series of articles that followed helped lay the foundation of the reef aquarium hobby, covering optical effects in aquariums, autofluorescent pigments in corals, calcification, and many other subjects.  His longstanding interests include predicting outcomes in aquariums through numerical simulations, and understanding the interplay between the three major physicochemical processes in reef aquariums: nutrient dynamics, gas exchange and calcification. He has frequently appeared on Reef Threads podcasts, and has presented at early and several recent MACNA conferences.  Today, Craig lives in Wisconsin and works at a major research University, where he continues to “use X-rays to take pictures” of molecules, and thinks about aquariums whenever his infant son doesn’t need his diaper changed.