McCarthy Engineering

Dr. Roger L. McCarthy is the founder and owner of McCarthy Engineering.   Dr. McCarthy is an officer and Treasurer of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a member of the NAE’s Executive Committee, and a member of the NAE’s Governing Council.  He is also a Director of The National Academies Corporation (TNAC), and a member of the TNAC Audit Committee.  

Dr. McCarthy specializes in the analysis of mechanical designs (and their associated risk) and the analysis of incidents, failures, and accidents involving issues related to mechanical, thermal, machine, architectural, and control design, particularly as it involves the engineering of the man/machine interface.  He has published research on safety, personal protective equipment, and fire/explosion/burns/heat transfer design issues.  He also analyzes technical issues associated with consumer product design and intellectual property issues related to design.  He has been extensively published in vehicular design, vehicle component design (occupant restraint, transmissions, engines (gas and diesel), fuel tank, brakes, wheels, axles, etc.), risk analysis related to mechanical designs, risk analysis of sports recreation and associated products, and the quantitative analysis of the reliability of complex systems.  In his career studying the man/machine interface, he has researched issues related to product information presentation, its measured effects on product user safety-related behavior, on-product warnings/instructions, and safety-related advertising.  

Dr. McCarthy has personally investigated many of the major disasters of modern times, including the loss of the Amoco Cadiz, the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt walkways, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  In 1996, Dr. McCarthy testified for multiple days in the second Menendez brother's murder trial on the crime reconstruction he performed for the prosecution, which ended in their conviction.  In 1992, then President Bush appointed Dr. McCarthy to a two-year term on the President’s Commission on the National Medal of Science.  Dr. McCarthy gave the Commencement Address for the University of Michigan's College of Engineering in April 2008.  Dr. McCarthy was one of the participants in the National Academy of Engineering's investigation of  the Macondo Well blowout and spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and one of the coauthors of its final report.  Dr. McCarthy chaired The Committee on the Analysis of Causes of Failure and Collapse of the 305-Meter Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory assembled by the NAE on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF).  

His research has addressed child and pediatric safety design issues in sports recreation, playground design, toys, and child-resistant closures, amongst others. During his human performance research, he directed the scientific testing of over 1,000 human subjects. Dr. McCarthy’s research has been cited thousands of times in technical literature.

For much of the last decade Dr. McCarthy has been studying 18650 unprotected lithium-ion power cell distribution chains and their marketing for misuse in e-cigarettes and vaping.  The on-product cell warning labels he developed have appeared on tens of millions of lithium-ion power cells manufactured throughout the world since 2017.  

Dr. McCarthy formerly served on the Board of Shui on Land (SOL), Ltd., (瑞安房地产), publicly traded (stock code 0272) on the Hong Kong Exchange, where he was a member of the Audit & Risk Committee and the Sustainability Committee. 

Dr. McCarthy is a Registered Mechanical Engineer in the states of California, Arizona, and Ohio. He was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, trained at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and was honorably discharged as a Captain in 1980. He has written scores of scientific papers and served for more than 20 years on the Visiting Committee of MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department and four years on the Department of Materials Science and Engineering Advisory Group at Stanford University.  He has served on the External Advisory Board of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan since 1990. He was formerly Chairman of the Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and served on the ASME’s Board of Safety Codes and Standards from 1998–2008. Dr. McCarthy is a former member of the Army Science Board.


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