A forensic engineer is a professional who applies engineering principles and expertise to investigate and analyze a wide variety of incidents, accidents and failures.  The goal of forensic engineering is to determine the root cause of an event, often for legal or insurance purposes.  Forensic engineers may work on cases involving structural failures, industrial accidents, transportation accidents, product defects, fires, and many more.

The responsibilities of a forensic engineer include:

Investigation:  Examining the physical evidence at the scene of an incident, accident, or failure to collect relevant information.

Analysis:  Applying engineering knowledge and analytical techniques to understand the sequence of events leading to the incident and identifying all contributing factors.

Documentation:  Creating detailed reports and documentation of findings, often to be used in legal proceedings or insurance claims.

Expert Witness:  Providing expert testimony in court or other legal settings.

Prevention Recommendations:  Recommending measures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Vident Partners’ expert panel includes 80+ forensic engineers in a wide variety of fields.  The longtime basic engineering divisions – mechanical, electrical, civil, industrial, etc. – include numerous specialties.  For example, we have a mechanical engineer who specializes in plastics extrusion processing and the manufacture of polyethylene pipe, and an electrical engineer who specializes in energy system storage.  And there are specialties that didn’t exist not so very long ago – for example, the history of software engineering begins in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  Our engineering experts’ specialties and subspecialties include, but are not limited to:

Mechanical engineering:  Control and autonomy for robotics, aircraft, spacecraft and self-driving vehicles

Electrical engineering:  Electronic hardware design

Petroleum engineering:  Horizontal drilling, extended reach drilling

Petroleum engineering:  Pipeline integrity, fixed equipment structural integrity

Environmental engineering

Fire protection engineering

Software engineering:  Audio digital signal processing

Agricultural and biological engineering:  Spraying systems

Safety engineering

Civil engineering:  Sanitary engineering, water and wastewater engineering

Civil engineering:  Geotechnical engineering

Biomedical engineering

Optical engineering:  Fiber optics, photovoltaic solar cells, photodetectors

And many more

In short, Vident Partners is your source for engineers in every imaginable field – and in fields that are not imaginable today, but will exist tomorrow.