Charles Farrar, PhD
LGNA Partner and Chief Engineer
Dr. Charles Farrar is a Partner and the Chief Engineer at the Lucidity Guild, bringing over four decades of deep technical expertise to the role. He spent 41 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), recently stepping down after a 20-year tenure as the Engineering Institute Leader. His career at LANL focused heavily on experimental and analytical structural dynamics for high-stakes systems—including weapons components and nuclear power plant structures subjected to seismic loading—before shifting to pioneering integrated hardware and software solutions for complex structural health monitoring challenges. Committed to education and workforce development, he also founded the Los Alamos Dynamics Summer School (LADSS) in 2000 and co-founded the Los Alamos Judicial Science School in 2014 to help judges evaluate technical evidence.
Charles earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Michigan Tech, followed by a master’s and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. A registered Professional Engineer in New Mexico, his contributions have been recognized with elite honors, including election as a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow and receiving the Society of Experimental Mechanics' Dominique DeMichele Award. He is a Fellow of the ASME, ASCE, and SEM, and has delivered keynotes at over 30 international conferences. Outside of his professional endeavors, he resides in Los Alamos with his wife, Lorraine, and is an active outdoor enthusiast who enjoys biking, hiking, running, and Nordic skiing.