Graduation Year and Degree: BSE ME ’72, AB Philosophy ’72
Employer: Exponent Inc
Job Title: Chairman of the Board
Location: Silicon Valley, California
Favorite Quote: "Some liketo start their mornings knowing what theirjob, their day, will entail. I know, if nothingelse, what I planned to do and what Iactually do are two completely differentthings. I love the fact that it’s totallyunpredictable."

IN THE EVER-changing computer world, many executives seem to change jobs with the seasons. So it is that Dr. Roger McCarthy (BSE ME ’72, AB Philosophy ’72) is a Silicon Valley anomaly. Of the 27 years that this executive has devoted to his engineering career, 26 have been with the same firm: Exponent, Inc., a company that investigates engineering failures.

McCarthy, now Exponent’s chairman of the board, joined the California-based company, then known as Failure Analysis Associates, Inc., in 1978 as an engineer. The reason amuses McCarthy and others who know the story: “I just couldn’t find a better job,” he said.

He had completed his master’s, professional and doctoral degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was looking for a job that would take him closer to his girlfriend, who was then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He ran across a magazine article that mentioned Failure Analysis Associates. It was a San Francisco-based company — after the winter of 1978 in Boston that’s all he needed to know.

“I invited myself for an interview,” he said. The rest is history. McCarthy joined the firm, which had barely three dozen employees and two offices. Two years later he became vice president; the following year, chief executive. He became chairman in 1986 and has remained in that role ever since. The company eventually became Exponent in 1998, and it has grown to 700 employees in 19 offices around the United States and abroad.

In 1990 McCarthy took Exponent public, then, in 1995, stepped down as CEO to pursue his passion: technical investigations. He had looked into the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways in 1981, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in 1989, and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. He conducted a murder reconstruction for prosecutors in the second Menendez brothers’ trial. And for the past three years he’s overseen the development of advanced defense technologies employed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

McCarthy said that his work is a perfect fit for “a professional student. When disasters occur, there’s a constant learning curve. It’s student life all over again.” The six years McCarthy spent at the University of Michigan were “some of the best times of my life. I intensely remember leaving each class, every single lecture, feeling intrinsically more valuable than when I began that day. I knew more, I understood more, and that meant a great deal to me.”

He also remembers a question he fielded repeatedly from his professors: What was a philosophy major doing in their engineering classes? McCarthy’s stock response was: “My GPA is in trouble; I’m here for some easy marks.”

His marks might have come easy or hard — he’s not saying — but one obvious fact is that they were exceptional. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, the 1972 Outstanding Undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering and was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Fellowship. McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the College hasn’t waned. He received the Alumni Society Merit Award for Mechanical Engineering in 1994 and serves on the department’s External Advisory Board. And he recently endowed the Roger L. McCarthy Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

In 2004 McCarthy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “major contributions to improved vehicle safety and for methods of quantitative assessment of the reliability of complex mechanical systems.”

“I was absolutely stunned...completely choked up,” he said. “It was something I’d dreamed of.” McCarthy unwinds by spending time with his wife and his son and daughter. Reading is a favorite pastime — Dean Koontz and Tom Clancy rank high among his favorites. And his antique microscope collection consumes plenty of time, too — something McCarthy is very willing to give.

“Microscopes were an incredible empowerment tool in the last century for scientists, extending their grasp of things they couldn’t see. They’re art. I just protect them for a while.”

Whether analyzing a disaster, cheering on the Wolverine football team or scouring the Web for a scope, McCarthy thrives on the learning that such variety brings. “Some like to start their mornings knowing what their job, their day, will entail. I know, if nothing else, what I planned to do and what I actually do are two completely different things. I love the fact that it’s totally unpredictable.”