Craig Mitchell Tarver

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Craig Mitchell Tarver died Sept. 22. He was 79.

Tarver was born in Syracuse, New York to Carl and Shirley Tarver. He spent his childhood in Syracuse and attended Central Tech High School where he played football and baseball. After graduating high school in 1965, he attended Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and was the President of Omicron Pi Omicron fraternity. He then attended John's Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland for grad school and earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

Tarver moved across the country to Palo Alto, California where he worked at Stanford Research Institute International for four years before he was hired at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1976. He would go on to work at LLNL for more than 40 years and published more than 200 scientific papers. Tarver’s scientific career concluded in 2021 when he received the American Physics Society's George E. Duvall Shock Compression Science Award.

Outside of his career in chemistry, he was a captain in the Army reserves and a youth baseball and football coach.

He is survived by his wife Virginia, brothers Terry and Wayne, sister Cheryl, sons Jason and James, daughters Jill, Nina and Liz, son in-law Bret, daughters in-law Katie and Sarah, grandchildren Jaxon, Merrick, Elijah, Keegan, Lea, Kadeand Tyler and his dogs Jasper and Gira.