Exponent Profile
Exponent, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a science and engineering consulting company that provides solutions to complex problems.
Clients
Exponent serves clients in chemical, construction, consumer products, energy, food, beverage and nutrition, government, life sciences, insurance, manufacturing, technology, industrial equipment, transportation and other sectors of the economy. Many of the company's engagements are initiated directly by large corporations or by lawyers or insurance companies whose clients anticipate, or are engaged in, litigation related to their products, equipment, processes or services. During 2023, the company provided services representing approximately 22%, 18%, 17% and 11% of revenues to clients in the consumer products industry, energy and utilities industries, transportation industry and chemical industry, respectively.
Services
Exponent provides high quality engineering and scientific consulting services to clients around the world. The company's service offerings are provided on a project-by-project basis. Many projects require support from multiple practices. The company operates the following 17 practices in two reportable operating segments, (i) Engineering and Other Scientific and (ii) Environmental and Health.
Engineering and Other Scientific segment
This segment includes Biomechanics, Biomedical Engineering & Sciences, Buildings & Structures, Civil Engineering, Construction Consulting, Data Sciences, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Human Factors, Materials & Corrosion Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Polymer Science & Materials Chemistry, Thermal Sciences, and Vehicle Engineering.
Biomechanics
The company's Biomechanics Practice uses engineering and principles of biomechanics to solve complex problems at the intersection of biology and engineering. The company's expertise is used to understand and evaluate the interaction between the human body as a biological system and the physical environment to explore the cause, nature, and severity of injuries. Additionally, the company utilizes biomechanical principles to evaluate injury potential associated the use (and misuse) of consumer and industrial products.
During the past year, the company's biomechanics staff performed analyses of human injuries which occurred while individuals were utilizing a variety of products including recreational vehicles, sporting goods, trucks, trains, aircraft, industrial equipment, and automobiles. They also looked at the implications of using protective devices (such as restraint systems, airbags, and helmets) on reducing the potential for injury, and assessed injuries in the workplace, in the home, and during recreational activities. The company's consultants also evaluated product designs for performance, hazards, and injury risks to assist clients with design modifications, address consumer feedback, and respond to regulators.
Biomedical Engineering and Sciences
The company's Biomedical Engineering and Sciences Practice applies engineering principles and scientific methodologies to medical technologies, including the evaluation of designs and performance of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and biologics. The company's engineers and scientists assist clients with characterization of biomaterials, medical devices, and their interactions with pharmaceuticals, cells, and tissues. To assist in regulatory clearance and approval, the company performs preclinical testing, help formulate related regulatory strategy, and conduct design verification and validation. The company also assists with design and manufacturing failure analyses, root cause assessment, recall management, and medical device explant analysis. In addition, the company's staff performs analysis of clinical outcomes for medical devices and related procedures using administrative claims databases. The company's expertise is also utilized in product liability, intellectual property litigation, technology acquisition and due diligence matters.
Buildings & Structures
The company's architects, structural engineers, and material scientists have been investigating such failures for decades, and the company use this experience to solve problems with a variety of structural systems and components, including finding the best repair options and mitigating the risk of future failures.
During the past year, the company has evaluated numerous problems with residential, commercial, transportation, and industrial structures for owners, designers, and builders at project sites around the world. The company's evaluations often include property inspections, laboratory or on-site testing, engineering analysis, and the development of repair recommendations. In addition, the company has worked with owners to assess and mitigate the risk of failure associated with hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, explosions, ground movement, and aging infrastructure. The company has assessed these risks to high-rise buildings, bridges, tunnels, industrial facilities, pipelines and nuclear power plant structures and provided testimony both in the U.S. and international courts of law.
Civil Engineering
The company's Civil Engineering Practice provides broad expertise that includes geotechnical engineering, geological engineering, engineering geology, and geology to address a host of geo-failures, complex international and domestic construction claims, and disputes involving expert consultation and testimony. Examples of geo-failures evaluated by the practice include landslides, foundation and retaining wall failures, pipeline failures, dam and levee failures.
The practice's evaluation of complex construction claims involves geotechnical design issues, site characterization, and damage from adjacent construction. Over the past year, the company's consultants have been engaged in a number of investigations related to wildland fires, landslide evaluations, construction claim and defect evaluations, foundation and retaining wall failures, and effects of infrastructure projects on the surrounding environments. The practice has been a leader in using advanced remote sensing technologies to evaluate complex problems and applying this state of the art technology to solutions and insight into clients' engineering challenges. This practice provided services for property owners, contractors, design professionals, state agencies, international government agencies, attorneys and insurance carriers.
Construction Consulting
The company's Construction Consulting Practice provides expertise in the areas of project advisory, risk analysis, strategic planning, dispute resolution, delay analysis and assessment of financial damages. The company has continued to expand the practice by leveraging key client relationships in several industry sectors including utilities, data centers, infrastructure, and oil and gas.
Over the past year, the company's team of advisors and experts have been retained on numerous complex projects around the world. The company's advisors and experts have successfully collaborated with the company's clients on numerous assignments, from assisting in establishing best-in-class construction and risk management processes and structures, managing a variety of programs and projects, to providing forensic analysis and expert advice in analyzing and resolving project performance, cost and schedule impact claims in both domestic and international arbitration, and private and public litigation matters. The company's multi-disciplinary staff, which includes engineers, project and program managers, schedulers, quantity surveyors, and cost specialists, provide these services to both the public and private sectors for clients who represent a diverse mix of corporations, law firms, and agencies. The company's projects support many sectors of the construction and engineering industry which include electric and gas utilities, refineries, petrochemical facilities, data centers, building construction, transportation systems, infrastructure, power plants, hospitals, airports, and sporting arenas.
Data Sciences
The Data Sciences practice comprises the company's core capabilities in statistics, data analytics, and dedicated data collection. Drawing on experience in a breadth of engineering, science, health, and environmental applications, the company assists clients with their most complex data challenges at all stages of the product or process life cycle. The company's team of interdisciplinary scientists and engineers designs sampling plans, surveys, and experiments to create, manage, and analyze data sets of all sizes and varieties. User-focused visualizations support data-driven decision-making and help clients measure risks and benefits to determine appropriate courses of action. Utilizing rigorous statistical methods, the company's team can help assess and improve quality and reliability and mitigate risk. The company's experience helps clients build products that perform for a wide variety of users while preventing data bias, collecting personal data with consideration for privacy, and managing the risks associated with global data collection.
During the past year, the company's team worked on diverse projects for government, industry, and legal clients. The company performed assessments of manufacturing quality systems, evaluated the durability and reliability of smart cards for identity management and credentialing, examined the in-service safety record of home appliances and medical devices and developed sampling plans associated with product recall campaigns.
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
The company's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Practice offers a broad range of expertise to address complex issues for industrial, government and legal clients. The company's power engineers advise clients on challenges relating to reliability of electrical systems, failures in power generation, transmission and distribution, as well as on distributed generation, and renewables. In the area of energy storage, the company is a leader in the industry in expertise and capabilities for safety of large format batteries, whether for electric vehicles or distributed storage.
The company's team of electronic engineers works on failure analysis, product robustness and reliability for consumer devices, industrial electronics and the health industry. The company's computer scientists and engineers advise high-tech industry clients and work with computer-controlled applications to evaluate product safety and software reliability. The computer science and engineering expertise the company offers encompasses a breadth of areas, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, information and numerical sciences, algorithms and data structures, computer graphics, computer architecture, networking and communications, as well as security and cryptography. The company operate laboratories for testing heavy equipment and electronics and the company has a broad capability in analyzing computer software.
Over the past year, the company performed a wide array of investigations ranging from assessing damage to electrical power infrastructure from the effect of weather-related events to working with clients to develop sophisticated machine learning algorithms applied to large quantities of unstructured data. The company continue to work with consumer electronics manufacturers and the transportation industry on the reliability and robustness of computer-controlled equipment for user safety.
Human Factors
The company's Human Factors Practice evaluates human performance and safety in product and system use. The company's consultants study how the limitations and capabilities of people, including memory, perception, attention, reaction time, judgment, physical size and dexterity, affect the way they use a product, interact with an organization or environment, process information or participate in an activity.
The company reviews warnings and labeling issues related to consumer products, pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, medical devices and industrial products supporting the development of safety information to accompany products and assessing claims that the safety information provided was inadequate.
The company applies its expertise in human behavior, warnings, and decision making in class actions suits, and in evaluating claims seeking to establish a class. In addition, the company assists manufacturers with compliance with regulatory guidelines related to products and work with them regarding analysis of adverse event reports and consumer complaints in publicly available databases overseen by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The company examines the role that attention plays in human perception, memory, and behavior, and how attention, inattention, and distraction may affect safety in a wide range of settings and activities (e.g., operating vehicles and machinery, walking, and using consumer products). The company addresses the reliability of human memory and retrospective reporting in the gathering of fact-based evidence. The company utilizes scientific investigations and research (e.g., human perception, reaction time, and looking behavior) to assess driver behavior in both accident investigations and during the design of automotive systems. The company's Human Factors scientists have been actively engaged in research and project work with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and automated vehicle technology, in order to understand and advise the company's clients on how these technologies may change the nature and dynamic of driving, and the role and performance of the driver.
The company provides user experience research, including focus groups, usability testing, and complex user studies with custom-tailored designs, across a wide range of industries, including consumer electronics, medical devices, and vehicle technologies. The company's Phoenix User Research Center, with 5,000 square feet of research space, has six lab suites, including a dedicated focus group room, an ophthalmological lab, a motion capture lab, and wearable eye tracking technology, plus connectivity to the company's vehicle test track. The scope of human factors engagements ranges from consulting on the company's clients' research to providing turnkey research solutions.
The company performs incident investigations and root cause analyses of near-misses and accidents involving human error in occupational and industrial settings. The company's Human Factors scientists have advanced technical systems training and experience required to understand how humans contribute to the initiation of, and emergency response to, explosions, fires, chemical releases, and major equipment failures in the manufacturing, utility, oil and gas, and construction industries, among others. The company also capitalizes on this knowledge to conduct human error risk and culture assessments to help clients proactively control human performance gaps, improve occupational and process safety performance, and create administrative controls and procedures.
In addition to helping clients address the frequency and severity of incidents related to human error, fatigue, and performance, these and other similar project activities can be leveraged to improve efficiency, reliability, and maintainability of normal operations.
Materials & Corrosion Engineering
The company's in-depth knowledge of materials science, corrosion, and metallurgical engineering combined with the breadth of the company's collective experience across many industries and disciplines gives the company's Materials and Corrosion Engineering Practice a unique ability to efficiently provide the company's clients with solutions to their complex materials-based problems. The company uses its knowledge and experience to understand how and why materials, products, and processes may not perform their intended function. Further, the company uses this knowledge to help its clients minimize the risk for future failures of new products as well as aging infrastructure.
Over the past year, the company's Materials and Corrosion Engineering Practice helped clients solve critical materials-related issues in the consumer electronics, medical devices, battery systems, chemical processing, transportation, energy, utilities, and aerospace fields, among others. The company's support of dispute resolution in the intellectual property, premises and product liability fields continued to grow supported by the company's strong position in direct industrial consulting.
Mechanical Engineering
The company provides clients with a thorough comprehension of current and alternate designs of mechanical systems to identify vulnerabilities before failures occur, develop appropriate risk mitigation methods, and provide post-failure investigations.
The company's consultants review the performance and reliability of industrial processes, manufactured products, and engineered systems, and the company determines the root cause of failures. The company assists in legal and insurance matters, failure investigations, product recall investigations, internal compliance programs, product development, workplace safety evaluations, and intellectual property matters.
The company's staff members develop and utilize detailed and validated computational models and laboratory experimental methods to evaluate products, systems, and equipment. The company performs field inspections, rely on industry standards, and utilize operational data to inform the company's analyses. The company has performed these activities in a broad range of industries, including transportation, energy, industrial equipment, building systems, medical devices, and consumer products.
During the past year, the company's mechanical engineers worked on a wide variety of projects, including international construction disputes, product recalls, and mechanical safety in product development.
Polymer Science & Materials Chemistry
The company's Polymer Science and Materials Chemistry Practice consults with industrial, government, legal, insurance and individual clients regarding polymers and textiles used in diverse applications, as well as the chemistry, materials and processing aspects of batteries, drug delivery systems, and other products that depend on highly controlled manufacturing environments.
The company assists clients in understanding the short- and long-term performance of plastic, rubber, adhesive, coating, composite, reactive chemical systems, and electrochemical energy storage systems when challenged by physical, chemical, thermal and other operational stressors. The company's work also includes customized chemical, electrochemical and rheological testing and leverages expanding internal infrastructure for instrumented analysis and advanced imaging capabilities.
The company's consultants participate in product development programs, perform failure analyses and provide support to clients involved in regulatory and legal proceedings and the protection of intellectual property. Clients value the company's technical expertise related to chemistry, formulation, manufacturing and materials performance, the company's understanding of the history and evolution of these materials, and the company's ability to assist them in identifying and incorporating emerging materials and manufacturing technologies into their businesses.
During the past year, significant program activities addressed aspects of battery systems, consumer electronics, wearable devices, implantable medical devices, drug delivery systems, medical diagnostics, building materials, water handling systems, oil and gas applications, the plastics supply chain, fire retardancy and flammability, technology scouting, materials science aspects of health risk, service life prediction, sustainability, and intellectual property related to consumer, recreational, medical, pharmaceutical, food packaging and other products.
Thermal Sciences
The company's Thermal Sciences Practice provides rapid response expert analysis to investigate failures involving thermo-fluid systems, fires, and explosions in industrial, residential, commercial, and transportation sectors. The company has investigated and analyzed thousands of thermal incidents ranging from high loss accidents in the oil and gas sector and major wildland fires, to small insurance claims. Information gained from these analyses has allowed the company to also assist clients in proactively making their assets and products safer.
The company's staff, consisting of mechanical, chemical, fire protection, aeronautical & astronautical and nuclear engineers, have assisted clients in assessing risk to, and from, their facilities, consumer product recalls, regulatory compliance and frequently provide expert testimony in domestic litigation and international arbitration. The company's engineers use advanced computational fluid dynamics, fire, and explosion modeling tools to supplement the company's analytical, experimental, and field-based activities. Preventive services include process safety hazard analysis for the chemical, oil & gas, and semiconductor industries, fire protection engineering, product development support, risk-based asset management, and dust explosion consulting.
In recent years, the Thermal Sciences Practice has developed tools to evaluate fire and explosion risks of lithium-ion batteries in applications including consumer products, vehicles, and grid-scale energy storage. The company continues to be very active in wildland fire investigation and continue to assist the company's clients in making informed risk-based decisions related to their assets and wildfires. The company has also developed analytical tools to assist utility clients assess the risk of ignition from their infrastructure.
During the past year, the company has continued to grow in its work in oil and gas exploration and production, liquefied natural gas and downstream oil & gas. The company's work in fire detection and protection related issues has remained robust, and the company's work in consumer product recall and international arbitration has also grown.
Vehicle Engineering
The company has performed thousands of investigations for the automotive, trucking, recreational vehicle, marine, aerospace, and rail industries. Internal research programs and client projects have resulted in technological contributions that have assisted manufacturers in the understanding of product performance and provided insight to government agencies in establishing policy and regulations. Information gained from these analyses has also assisted clients in assessing preventive measures related to the design of their products, as well as evaluating failures.
The company's Test and Engineering Center located in Phoenix, Arizona, is used for the company's most complex testing and analysis. The company has gained a worldwide reputation for the company's ability to mobilize resources expeditiously and efficiently, integrate a broad array of technical disciplines, and provide valuable insight that is objective and withstands rigorous scrutiny. Many of the company's projects involve addressing the cause of accidents and the company's clients rely on the company to determine what happened in an accident and why it happened. In many cases, clients also want the company to assess what could have been done to reduce the severity of the accident or to mitigate occupant injuries to those involved.
Current advances in emerging transportation technologies and concepts allow the company's multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and analysts across numerous practices to focus on the development and implementation of connected vehicles, automated vehicles, connected/smart cities, and data analyses. Whether the objective is design analysis, component testing, failure analysis, or accident reconstruction, the company's knowledge of vehicle systems and engineering principles coupled with the company's experience from conducting full-scale tests aim to add insight and proficiency to every project.
Environmental and Health Sciences segment
This segment includes Chemical Regulation & Food Safety, Ecological & Biological Sciences, Environmental & Earth Sciences, and Health Sciences.
Chemical Regulation & Food Safety
The company's Chemical Regulation and Food Safety Practice includes both technical and regulatory specialists who are experts in dealing with foods, food ingredients, cosmetics, dietary supplements, pesticides and biocides (including conventional chemicals, microbials, antimicrobials/biocides, biopesticides, emerging technologies and products of biotechnology), industrial chemicals, pesticide/biocide devices, consumer products, medical devices and pharmaceuticals. The company provides practical, scientific and regulatory support to meet global business objectives at every stage of the product life cycle, from research and development to retail and beyond.
During the past year, the company's Chemical Regulation and Food Safety staff have conducted a wide array of work. The European and U.S. sides of the practice were jointly involved with ongoing support of several new pesticide active ingredients and end-use products. The European side of the company's business was involved with many projects related to plant protection and biocidal product regulatory submissions, from new active substances and those under review to product-specific dossiers for European member states. This has included new technologies in plant protection that meet the regulatory pressures to achieve greater sustainability. The company has provided support for reviews of a large number of biocidal products through European and South Korean regulatory reviews. In addition, the company provided many specialist assessments relating to human and environmental exposure, risk and product efficacy, as well as national and international Maximum Residue Limit/import tolerance submissions covering countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The U.S. side of the company's business was also involved in many projects related to agrochemical, antimicrobial, emerging technologies and biochemical product regulatory submissions in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. These included new active ingredients, end-use products, emerging technologies and import tolerances (EPA and FDA). The company's state registration business remained solid in the U.S. In Europe and the U.S., the company continued to provide clients with regulatory compliance support for food contact materials, food additives, novel foods, nutrition-related analyses, as well as undertaking safety assessments for food, cosmetic and consumer products. The company's European and U.S. teams have been working together to help clients navigate and comply with the new FDA MoCRA Cosmetics regulations that took effect in 2023.
The company also provided proactive and reactive product safety and litigation support. For industrial chemicals, the company continued to provide full regulatory support for the company's clients who prepared and submitted registrations and risk assessments. The company's European and U.S. offices were active in supporting the company's clients with their E.U. and U.K. Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act regulatory requirements.
Ecological & Biological Sciences
The company's ecological and biological scientists provide strategic support on issues related to the environment and natural resources damages associated with chemicals and forest fires, international environmental disputes, ecosystem service assessments for businesses, adverse weather events/climate change, ecological risk assessment, ecotoxicology, novel remediation methods, restoration of wetlands and other natural resources, large development projects, resource utilization (such as mineral mining, oil and gas, wood pulp, transportation, etc.), agriculture land-use impacts, genomic assessments, product stewardship, and the use of chemicals and other products in commerce. Focusing on both legacy and emerging contaminants, the practice specializes in assessing the integrated effects of chemical, biological, and physical stressors on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Many of these assessments utilize a causal analysis approach to determine causation systematically and transparently in complex and interrelated situations. The practice is consisted of nationally and internationally recognized experts that cover disciplines related to the fate and effects of chemical constituents and other stressors, including the ecological implications and risks associated with these projects.
Environmental & Earth Sciences
The company's environmental scientists and engineers provide cost-effective, scientifically defensible and realistic assessments and solutions to complex environmental issues. The company offers technical, regulatory, and litigation support to industries that include oil and gas, mining and minerals, chemicals, forest products, railroads, aerospace, development, and trade associations, and to municipal and governmental clients. The company's consultants specialize in the areas of environmental fate and transport, environmental chemistry and forensics, remediation consulting, environmental engineering and waste management, and natural resources damages assessment.
The company's expertise also includes hydrology and hydrogeology, modeling and monitoring, water quality, water rights and water resources, extreme weather event and climate change risk management, and evaluation of environmental and social risks.
The company's work frequently involves complex and high visibility environmental problems and issues, often the focus of environmental or toxic tort claims, where evaluation of contamination and historical reconstruction of events, releases, and doses are central to problem resolution.
The company provides case-specific strategic and advisory consulting on risk mitigation, planning, and environmental regulatory and policy issues, as well as high-level technical strategic consulting to support critical business decisions and for complex matters where understanding the long-term implications of early technical actions is critical to managing overall liability.
Health Sciences
The company's health scientists, including epidemiologists, toxicologists, industrial hygienists, exposure scientists, biostatisticians, risk assessment scientists, and physicians, apply scientific and medical principles to examine and address complex human-health-related risk, benefit, and value issues in a variety of settings. The company's consultants are recognized nationally and internationally for their outstanding expertise and credentials, and their decades of experience in government, academia, and industry sectors.
The company's work has included numerous community and environmental health assessments, disease cluster investigations, survey research, real-world data platforms, cohort and case-control studies, exposure assessment and simulation studies, biologically based modeling, meta-analyses, and state-of-the-art literature reviews. The company has addressed critical issues for clients on industrial chemicals, pesticides, mineral fibers, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer products, digital health technology, nanotechnology, and other agents and products as they relate to human health risk.
The company's multidisciplinary team has extensive experience investigating a broad variety of health concerns, such as claims of adverse health effects from exposures to a wide range of physical agents (e.g., ionizing radiation, and low- and radio-frequency electromagnetic fields); chemical agents (e.g., volatile organic compounds, metals, dusts, air pollutants, mineral fibers, fumes, and nanoparticles); and biological agents (fungi/molds, bacteria, and other micro-organisms).
The company can assess the potential health effects of occupational and environmental exposures; investigate accidental releases of chemicals and evaluate fate and transport of chemical substances; characterize consumer and workplace exposures through simulation and exposure reconstruction; develop measures of prevention and exposure control; and assist clients with occupational safety and health evaluations.
In the past few years, the company has expanded its expertise to include pharmacoepidemiology; the development and application of real-world evidence (RWE) for regulated medical products (pharmaceuticals and biologics, vaccines, devices, and combination products); and digital therapeutics, across the product life cycle from pre-approval planning to market access to post-approval safety evaluation and regulatory consulting on emergent safety issues. The company's Health Sciences team, working closely with Biomechanics, Biomedical Engineering & Sciences, Data Sciences, Human Factors, Polymer Science & Materials Chemistry, and other practices, has considerable expertise in healthcare data science; strategy, design, and application of health economics and outcomes research, such as burden-of-illness assessment; selection, quality assessment, and analysis of electronic health records (EHR) and healthcare claims and the explication of methodological issues, such as randomization, bias, data linkages, drug interactions, and identification of high-risk populations.
History
Exponent, Inc. was founded in 1967.
