Academic Credentials
  • M.S., Electrical Engineering VLSI Design, University of Southern California, 2003
  • B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 2002
Licenses & Certifications
  • Professional Engineer Electrical, California, #19170
  • Professional Engineer Electrical, Nevada, #23078
  • Certified Fire and Explosion Investigator (CFEI)
Professional Affiliations
  • IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (member)
  • NFPA National Fire Protection Association
  • NAFI National Association of Fire Investigators

Mr. Stepan specializes in electrical and electronic systems, particularly digital and embedded systems. He has extensive practical experience in embedded systems, software design (C/C++, JAVA, ADA, Perl, assembly, and other languages), and HDL design (VHDL and Verilog).

Mr. Stepan has experience in root cause failure analysis investigations for a broad range of electrical issues. Products investigated include appliances, consumer electronics, battery systems, power supplies, industrial electrical equipment, medical devices, and military systems. Mr. Stepan also has experience with evaluation, review, FMEA analysis, single point failure analysis, reliability analysis, and safety analysis of electronics and the electronics manufacturing process.

Mr. Stepan additionally has an extensive background working with computer architecture, real-time systems, avionics, process control, configuration control, and electronics manufacturing and design cycles.

Prior to joining Exponent, Mr. Stepan was employed at Northrop Grumman, Navigation Systems Division. His work experience includes lead designer of System Processors for several Inertial Navigation System product lines. This encompassed Digital Card Design, PCB Layout, Signal Integrity Analysis, FPGA design and verification, production testing development, managing manufacturing process and configuration control, firmware development, system integration, and design process development. His experience also includes developing System/Subsystem hardware requirements, requirements traceability, and requirements verification and validation.