David Tarver honored with ECE Alumni Merit Award

To honor his successful and multifaceted career, David Tarver (BSE MSE EE ‘75 ‘76) received the 2024 ECE Alumni Merit Award. In his award lecture, titled, “Engineering Community: Cooperating at scale, from Motown to Tik Tok…to ChatGPT,” he shared the story of his professional journey, inspired by his family, his professional mentors, and his love for Motown jazz.

“When I say ‘engineering community,’ I’m not talking about a group… I’m talking about engineering in the way of planning, designing, or building––in other words, creating,” Tarver said. “So we want to build groups of people who have something in common.”

“When we talk about engineering community, there’s always some type of technology behind that. Six thousand years ago, it was the harp!” he continued, with a laugh.

For Tarver, it was the Moog electronic music synthesizer. As an undergraduate student at the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in Flint, Michigan, he wandered into a concert where he encountered the instrument for the first time. As an enthusiast of both engineering and music, he was instantly enthralled. He made up his mind then and there to create a digital version, as dreams of impressing and performing with Motown star Stevie Wonder took shape.

Shortly thereafter, Tarver transferred to U-M, where he worked with Prof. Bill Williams on the remainder of his undergraduate studies in bioengineering. When he neared the completion of his degree and expressed interest in graduate school, Williams encouraged him to focus his master’s degree on electrical engineering, rather than bioengineering––a perfect opportunity for Tarver to formally work on his digital music synthesizer.

He did just that, presenting his master’s thesis on the digital synthesizer under Associate Professor Emeritus Leo McAfee, a fellow ECE alum (MS PhD EE ‘67 ‘70) and the first Black faculty member hired into the College of Engineering.

“You can imagine my pride, coming from a situation where my father loved electronics and couldn’t work in the field,” Tarver recalled with emotion, “to come to the University of Michigan and see a [Black] man who had achieved this height in engineering. It was just great.”

When Tarver wasn’t in class or working on his master’s thesis, he spent his time at the Minority Engineering Program Office, which provided support for the “fledgling new group of Black engineers” at the university.

“I never really felt a part of the full engineering community at Michigan,” Tarver said. “My community was this little band of Black engineering students who were fostered and supported by the assistant dean, Anne Monterio, and we were fighting to survive in the College of Engineering and, in some cases, to excel.”

Indeed, Tarver did excel through the remainder of his education, with the mentorship of McAfee and Monterio. Master’s degree in hand, Tarver went on to work at the prestigious Bell Labs. He planned to make his digital music synthesizer into a commercial product, but his progress was soon halted because he hadn’t consulted any professional musicians in the process of developing it. He found that his product was not viable in the market. This was his first lesson on entrepreneurship: connect with your community and consult them for feedback.

“My dream died,” he said, “but a new business was born––and if I had not… been doing [that work on my synthesizer] for eight years, I might not have been able to seize on this business opportunity.”

We think we have the ability to change the world – let’s change it!

David Tarver

Tarver realized through his work at Bell Labs that the technology enabling his music synthesizer could also be used to develop a telecommunications product. Working in a basement with two colleagues, Steve Moore and Charles Simmons, he co-founded Telecom Analysis Systems, Inc. (TAS).  They made products that simulated the analog telephone network and tested the performance of dial-up internet modems in a laboratory setting, later moving on to digital, cable, and wireless network communications.

Using the lessons from earlier in his career, Tarver and his colleagues were able to target their consumer base to develop a successful product and, through this work, Tarver realized that he was part of a global community.

Tarver, Moore, and Simmons ultimately sold TAS to a larger, UK-based company: Spirent, PLC (then Bowthorpe) for $30 million dollars. Tarver credits the success of their company and its influence on Spirent to their efforts in creating a community vision and a community connection.

“We were the first telecommunications company that this company purchased,” Tarver said. “They owned 97 different addresses around the world––everything from aircraft black boxes… to nylon tie wraps for industrial cabling––but when the CEO saw our focus and what our performance was, he asked me to help them build a telecommunications division. It’s hard to believe, but in just three years, that division became the entire company.”

After selling TAS and working for Spirent, Tarver left the telecommunications field behind and refocused on improving his local community in Red Bank, New Jersey, where children were struggling with math education. By uniting the local educational stakeholders, Tarver helped raise the standardized math test scores from under 22% to over 66% in just three years. After this experience, Tarver said, he was convinced of the power of community action.

He also used his newfound time away from the engineering sector to explore other interests. He wrote a memoir called Proving Ground, performed as a vocalist, and joined a local theater company. “I was trying things and trying to understand life,” he said.

In 2007, Tarver moved back to Michigan to be closer to his mother and contribute to his hometown community, but he was troubled by the economic inequities he found upon returning to his home state. While communities like Ann Arbor seemed to be thriving, issues like the Flint water crisis went unaddressed in lower-income communities.

“It kept resonating in my head: if we are so smart, why do we have this situation?” he said. “Can we engineer a community that does something about this?”

Tarver was committed to improving community vitality, so, with help from his communities, he founded the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative to help meet the unique needs of urban areas. He also started a new course within the Center for Entrepreneurship called Urban Entrepreneurship Practicum, which prepares students to think about community in their business ventures. This class allows Tarver to pass on to his students the lessons he learned earlier in life––that he had to learn the hard way.

“Think about your customers and you being part of a community,” he tells his students. “Who are you serving? What do they need? what are you doing for them?”

Tarver remains committed to making a difference in his communities, at every scale. He envisions a global community of urban innovators that identifies and shares emerging solutions for community vitality. His personal and professional journey has led him to this point––as a successful electrical engineer, entrepreneur, telecommunications expert, author, and community changemaker––but that journey continues on.

“I’m honored,” he said, at the end of his talk, “but I do want to say: I’m not done yet! We think we have the ability to change the world – let’s change it!”