Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Engineering Sciences, Harvard University, 1994
  • M.S., Engineering Sciences, Harvard University, 1991
  • B.S., Engineering Mechanics, Michigan State University, 1989
Licenses & Certifications
  • IDPA Safety Officer Certification
  • High Master Classification, High Power Rifle Competition
  • Certified Abbreviated Injury Scale Specialist (CAISS)
Additional Education & Training
  • Blood Detection, Documentation & Collection Techniques
  • AIS2015 Online Course, AAAM
  • Forensic Shooting Incident Reconstruction Course
Professional Honors
  • Department of the Army, Commander's Award for Public Service
  • International Society of Biomechanics Promising Scientist Award
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow
  • MSU Alumni Distinguished Scholar
Professional Affiliations
  • American Society for Bone and Mineral Research
  • Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine (AAAM), Scientific Program Committee
  • International Ballistics Society, Senior Member
  • International Defensive Pistol Association

Amy Courtney, Ph.D., CAISS, provides technical expertise in areas including injury biomechanics, premises liability, ballistics, and blast injury. She delivers expert analysis and consulting related to traumatic injury events and product liability assessments for clients in automotive, industrial, and firearms-related product manufacturing, transportation, construction, and infrastructure.

Dr. Courtney specializes in combining principles of physics, engineering, and the mechanical properties of the human body to answer complex questions related to injury risk, causation, mitigation, and prevention. Her ballistics expertise includes the safe operation of firearms; the internal physics, trajectories, and terminal behavior of ammunition; and shooting incident reconstruction. She has more than 40 years of experience evaluating the mechanical response of musculoskeletal tissues in normal, aging, disease, and injury conditions. 

Dr. Courtney's work addresses issues including mechanisms and timing of injuries in complex events. She evaluates whether and how the severity of an event, product safety features such as seat belts, airbags, and ADAS features, or proper use versus misuse affect injury risk from a scientific perspective as well as how injury risk during an event is affected by anthropometry, age, and history.

In addition to her engineering training and expertise, her doctoral studies in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program, included medical coursework and clinical training at Harvard Medical School. She is also a Certified Abbreviated Injury Scale Specialist (CAISS), which is an established method for categorizing the severity of acute injuries for scientific analysis and research.

In applying her training and experience, Dr. Courtney's consulting approach integrates principles of physics and engineering, anatomy, biomechanics, scholarly research, field inspections, product evaluations, computational analyses, and testing as needed to deliver rigorous, scientifically supported conclusions.

Before joining Exponent, Dr. Courtney was a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation and the Orthopedic Biomechanics Laboratory of Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She also held an appointment as an assistant professor teaching physics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Her research is documented in more than 80 publications in the medical and scientific literature.