Dr. Charles Funk is an accomplished Professional Engineer and consultant with forensic experience in both accident reconstruction and fire cause and origin investigation. His major practice areas include the forensic investigation of vehicular and non-vehicular collisions involving people, objects, and vehicles as well as the forensic investigation of residential and commercial fires. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Funk has investigated several hundred motor vehicle collisions. His investigations have included motorized wheelchairs, pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, passenger vehicles, and commercial vehicles. He is a trained Bosch Crash Data Retrieval (CDR) technician and has participated in numerous downloads from frontal, side, rear, and rollover events. He has published research on the acceleration and braking performances of school buses and has conducted research in bumper mismatch collisions, narrow object impacts, and vehicle backing studies.

Dr. Funk’s thermal sciences experience includes conducting fire cause and origin investigations as well as analyses of combustion, fluid flow, and thermodynamics. He is a Certified Fire and Explosions Investigator and a Certified Vehicle Fire Investigator through the National Association of Fire Investigators. Dr. Funk has investigated numerous gas and electric appliances to determine whether or not they had role in causing the fire.

For his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Dr. Funk performed experimental and computational comparisons of turbulent flows in an internal combustion engine. This included innovative work in the form of some of the first high-resolution turbulence measurements that contributed to the development and validation of advanced turbulence models.

Solving complex puzzles has preoccupied Dr. Funk since boyhood where he was intrigued by cryptogram, jigsaw, crossword, and Sudoku puzzles. In college, the fascination was manifest in his choice to major in mechanical engineering. Dr. Funk has a passion for trying to figure out how an object functions and is constructed and applies this knowledge to forensic investigations to determine how the collision, fire loss, or failure occurred.