Licensed professional engineer: Missouri · Oklahoma · Arkansas · Kansas · Nebraska
Twenty years building, then five designing, then forensics. The assembly under evaluation is usually one he has built.
About twenty years in construction: union carpentry foreman, commercial superintendent, project manager, general contractor. That is not background colour. A great deal of forensic disagreement turns on how an assembly was actually put together, what the installer would plausibly have done on that day, and which defects are original to the work rather than caused by the loss. Those questions are easier to answer having done the work.
BS in Civil Engineering, structural focus, through the Washington University and UMSL joint engineering program. Five years in structural design before moving to forensics.
Forensic work covering causation in hail, wind, fire, vehicle impact and structural losses, from single-family residences through to an industrial roof of roughly 300,000 square feet. The work is done for insurance carriers and for counsel, which means every opinion is written expecting to be read by someone whose job is to find the hole in it.
He builds the reasoning systems he uses rather than buying them, which is the reason he can speak to how they behave under scrutiny.
That work includes a formal reasoning framework governed by a written amendment process, where a change to the rules leaves a dated record of what changed and why. It also includes a runtime built on that framework which keeps an append-only, tamper-evident record of every governed determination, tracks what each one cost, and is prevented by construction from editing its own source or its own rules.
The eliminative admissibility framework behind the method is written up as Six Reasoning Operators: An Eliminative Admissibility Framework for Forensic Causal Inference.
The write wall is the part that matters. A system permitted to rewrite the standard it is judged against cannot be audited, so it was built unable to do so before anyone asked for that.