Paul Urtiew

Paul Urtiew died Nov. 2.  He was 92.

Urtiew was born in 1931 in Nish, Yugoslavia to Andrei Pavlovich and Margarita Vladimirovna Urtiew. He began his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley, where, after a 2-year U.S.  Army stint, he graduated in 1964 with a doctorate in mechanical engineering. He went on to spend his entire career working for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a researcher scientist. He was an international leader in combustion, detonation, and shock wave science. Much of his career was spent in the Energetic Materials Center. He was instrumental in developing gauges that could be embedded in solid high explosives to measure position and time dependent properties in a detonation. This work dramatically advanced the field and led to a much greater understanding of the safety and hazards of explosive systems. Urtiew served as a highly valued interpreter and host for Russian-speaking scientists visiting international conferences.