Craig Lowe was born at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia on July 18, 1957. He attended public school in DeKalb and Fulton Counties, graduating from Crestwood High School as a member of the National Honor Society and designated a Great Young American of the Day by WSB-AM radio.
Craig learned the fundamentals of business as an independent contractor carrier for the Atlanta Journal at age 16, conducting aspects of billing, collections, sales, customer service and service delivery. As a child growing up in the Atlanta area, Craig witnessed the unchecked and unplanned growth there and the irrevocable environmental damage and displacement of affordable housing that resulted.
While attending the University of Georgia, Craig worked weekends at a textile plant and also at the Chemistry Library on campus. Punctuation his time in college were summers working in a plywood plant in Georgia and a summer internship with the National Park Service at Cumberland Island National Seashore. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture degree with a major in Soil Conservation and Morphology from Georgia, Craig moved to Gainesville where he pursued and received a Master of Science in Teaching degree in Zoology from the University of Florida.
Since then Craig worked as a Biological Scientist in the UF School of Forestry studying the effects of acid rain and ozone pollution of pine trees, and also worked for 11 years in the UF Botany department as Laboratory Manager and later as a computer programmer at the Florida Center for Library Automation.
Craig served as a Gainesville City Commissioner from 2003 to 2010 when he became Gainesville’s fourth elected mayor in recent history. Craig’s experiences growing up and as an adult have shaped his realization that our environment, our economy, and opportunity are intertwined. He expresses these values through hobbies such hiking, biking, canoeing and also by serving as a mentor to an Alachua County High School student.
