Donald Craig was born in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1961, and was brought up on the other side of the Pennines in Lancaster, Lancashire. After school in Morecambe, he worked for a year as a pre-university student at ICI's Corporate Laboratory at Runcorn.
He obtained his chemistry degree at Imperial College (1983), and his Ph.D. (1986) also at Imperial, working for his doctorate on insect antifeedant synthesis under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley FRS. In 1986/87 he spent 11 months as an SERC (now EPSRC)/NATO postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Clark Still at Columbia University, where he worked on semi-synthetic derivatives of the ionophore monensin A in order to probe the effects of macrocyclic conformation on epoxidation stereoselectivity.
He was appointed to the academic staff at Imperial College in 1987 as a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, and in 1997 was promoted to Reader. In 2000 he was promoted to a personal Chair in the Department. In 1994 he received the ZENECA Award for Research in Organic Chemistry, and the Pfizer Academic Award. In 1996 he received one of the Glaxo Wellcome Awards for Innovative Organic Chemistry. In 1998 he was awarded a NOVARTIS Chemistry Lectureship, and received the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry the same year.
His non-chemistry interests include R'n'B (including the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughan), food, fine wine and association football. He is a fan of Liverpool FC.