Exponent, Inc

Exponent

Formerly called	Failure Analysis Associates
Traded as	NASDAQ: EXPO S&P 600 Component
Industry	research
Founded	April 1967 in Palo Alto, California, United States
Founders	Alan Stephen Tetelman Bernard Ross Marsh Pound John Shyne Sathya V. Hanagud
Headquarters	149 Commonwealth Drive, Menlo Park, California, United States
Key people	Paul R. Johnston, CEO
Number of employees	900
Website	exponent.com

Exponent (formerly Failure Analysis Associates) is an American engineering and scientific consulting firm. Exponent has a multidisciplinary team of scientists, physicians, engineers, and business consultants which performs research and analysis in more than 90 technical disciplines. The company operates 20 offices in the United States and five offices overseas.

Failure Analysis Associates (FaAA) was founded in April 1967 by then Stanford University professor Alan Stephen Tetelman along with his colleagues Bernard Ross, Marsh Pound, John Shyne and Sathya V. Hanagud with $500 in capital.

At the time of FaAA's founding, Ross was also an engineering program manager at SRI International (then the Stanford Research Institute) (1965–1970). While en route to the site of a Navy jet crash investigation, Tetelman was killed on September 25, 1978, in the PSA Flight 182 air crash over San Diego between a PSA jet liner and a private Cessna airplane that claimed the lives of 144 people. He was forty-two years old.

Ross assumed the presidency of Failure Analysis Associates after the accident. Ross and the late Tetelman were featured in a documentary film about the company titled "What Went Wrong" made by the United States Information Service and distributed worldwide. Tetelman was a world-renowned expert in fracture mechanics and co-authored a textbook titled "The Principles of Engineering Materials" with Craig R. Barrett (former CEO of Intel) and Stanford professor, William D. Nix, published by Prentice-Hall in 1973.

In 1982, Roger McCarthy assumed the leadership of FaAA, becoming Chief Executive Officer in 1982 until 1996, and Chairman of the Board in 1986 until 2005. McCarthy joined FaAA in 1978 and became a Director and Vice-President in 1980. In 2004, McCarthy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Michael R. Gaulke served as the Chief Executive Officer of Exponent Inc. from June 1996 to May 28, 2009. He is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors. Mr. Gaulke served as President of Exponent Inc. from March 1993 to May 22, 2007. Mr. Gaulke first joined Exponent Inc. in September 1992 and served as its Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In 2008, Oregon State University inducted Mr. Gaulke into its Engineering Hall of Fame.