Exponent, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Exponent Inc. fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joni Constantelos, Managing Director at Riveron. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on Exponent's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 financial results conference call. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the investor relations section of the company's corporate website at www.exponent.com. This conference call is the property of Exponent, and any taping or other reproduction is expressly prohibited without prior written consent. Joining me on the call today are Dr. Katherine Corrigan, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Rich Schlenker, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, Exponent's market opportunities and future financial results that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in Exponent's periodic SUC filings, including those factors discussed under the caption risk factor in Exponent's most recent Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements and risks in this conference call are based on current expectations as of today. An exponent assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. And now I will turn the call over to Dr. Katherine Corrigan, Chief Executive Officer.

Katherine? Thank you, Joni, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I will start off by reviewing our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 business performance. Rich will then provide a more detailed review of our financial results and outlook for 2026. and we will then open the call for questions. We delivered a strong finish to 2025, reflecting the strength, diversification, and resilience of our portfolio. During the fourth quarter, we saw growth in proactive engagements, driven by increased demand for user research and consumer electronics, along with continued expansion of our risk management work in the utility sector. Growth in our reactive services was driven by failure analysis and dispute-related engagements across a broad range of industries, including energy, construction, transportation, and life sciences. Turning to our engagements in more detail, growth in proactive engagements in the fourth quarter reflected continued diversification across a broader mix of clients and an expanding range of products and technologies. In consumer electronics, we saw increased demand for user research engagements, driven by the need to evaluate product performance and user interaction as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in both everyday and novel devices. We also saw continued growth in risk management and asset integrity services for utilities, supported by rising energy demand and increased focus on grid reliability. In life sciences, engagements increased across regulatory compliance, product performance, and safety consulting for medical devices as these safety-critical technologies continue to become more complex. Turning to our reactive engagements, demand for exponents failure analysis and dispute-related services drove growth in the fourth quarter, reflecting the essential role our engineers and scientists play when systems do not perform as expected. In transportation, we saw increased failure analysis work tied to electrification and battery systems in commercial vehicles as customers addressed performance, safety, and reliability challenges. We expanded our failure investigation work in data center infrastructure, for example, addressing board-level cooling and thermal management issues where multidisciplinary teams are required to determine the root cause of failure. Across the energy sector, we continue to see robust demand in dispute-related engagements spanning hydroelectric facilities, wildfire-related losses, battery energy storage systems, and wind and solar projects. Exponent continues to benefit from powerful long-term market drivers. As artificial intelligence and other complex technologies are increasingly incorporated into novel products, infrastructure, and safety-critical systems, demand is growing for our science and engineering expertise to support and enhance algorithm performance. Sensor-based systems that demand the highest level of trust are also frequently found in the most challenging, disrupted, or intermittent connectivity environments, creating settings where security and safety are inseparable. While AI delivers value by learning and predicting based on historical data, Many of the most consequential challenges arise in physical systems where edge cases, novel conditions, and complex interactions fall outside of prior experience. Exponent thrives at the edge where AI meets the laws of physics, in high-stakes environments where reliability, performance, and security cannot be compromised. These dynamics underpin sustained long-term demand for exponents' multidisciplinary expertise. Our teams apply deep capabilities in engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, material science, cybersecurity, human behavior, and more to help clients validate and enhance system performance, identify risk, ensure security at the asset level, and apply scientific judgment where complexity and uncertainty exceed the limits of algorithms alone. As AI-enabled systems are deployed more broadly, failures, whether at the algorithm or the physical system level, are becoming more complex, more difficult to diagnose, and more consequential. Determining the root cause of these failures demands rigorous investigation that integrates physical sciences, engineering, data science, and human factors to reconstruct real world conditions and system behavior. Exponent's longstanding failure analysis expertise uniquely positions us to support clients as they navigate these situations, delivering independent science-based insight that informs remediation, accountability, and innovation. As artificial intelligence and other complex technologies increasingly intersect with performance and safety critical applications, this capability remains a core and differentiating component of the long-term value that we provide. At the same time, we are leveraging artificial intelligence within our operations to add value and support our teams as demand for our expertise continues to grow. These tools enable our experts to work more effectively, focused on the highest value aspects of their work, and deploy their capabilities where they matter most. Looking ahead, Exponent continues to benefit from powerful long-term market drivers, including increasing complexity, rapid technological innovation, and rising expectations around safety, health, and the environment. As artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies become more deeply embedded in novel products and critical systems, clients are facing an expanding set of complex, high-stakes challenges. This environment is driving increasing demand for independent, multidisciplinary expertise and is supporting continued diversifications across technologies, products, and clients, as reflected in our results. Together, these dynamics position Exponent to deliver rigorous science-based insight across the full product lifecycle and support long-term growth. I'll now turn the call over to Rich to provide more detail on our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 results, as well as discuss our outlook for the first quarter and the full year 2026.