Craig Partridge (born July 17, 1961) is an American computer scientist who helped create the Internet's technology.

He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C. in 1979. He earned his A.B. in history in 1983 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1992 from Harvard University.

From 1983, Partridge worked as a researcher at BBN Technologies, where he later became the Chief Scientist for networking research. In the 1980s, he helped develop a method to route emails using domain names. He also worked with Phil Karn to improve the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by creating Karn's algorithm, which helps computers estimate how long it takes to send data. In the 1990s, he co-invented anycast addressing and led the team that built the first multi-gigabit router.

Partridge was part of the first Internet Engineering Steering Group. He chaired the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM). He also edited the IEEE Network Magazine and SIGCOMM's Computer Communication Review. He served on the National Science Foundation's Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee and on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. He taught as an adjunct professor at Stanford University and the University of Michigan and led the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University until 2023.

He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow for helping develop Internet protocols that support larger and faster networks. In 2017, Partridge was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Selected works

• "Mail Routing and the Domain System," RFC 974, Craig Partridge, 1986.
• "Improving Round-Trip Time Estimates in Reliable Transport Protocols," Phil Karn, Craig Partridge, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 1987.
• "Host Anycasting Service," RFC 1546, Craig Partridge, Trevor Mendez, Walter Milliken, 1993.
• Gigabit Networking, Craig Partridge, Addison-Wesley, 1993. ISBN 978-0201563337.