Kristi Kodama is in the process of obtaining her bachelor’s degree in materials engineering at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, also known as Cal Poly SLO. She is currently a hardware development engineer intern at Amazon, helping the tooling team to produce a testing product that will be used internally within the company.

Kristi is a devoted member of the Formula SAE team at her college, where she gets the opportunity to design, manufacture, validate, and race both a combustion and an electric car. She is currently the team manager of the club and was the former materials lead. During her time on Formula, she led the testing of chassis composite structures and aided in the manufacturing of two carbon-fiber, monocoque chassis. Her new role as the team manager will allow her to be in charge of the club’s monetary issues along with financing of the club. Moreover, her current job at Amazon has allowed Kristi to develop her design and communication skills as she gets to invent her own product while discussing manufacturing limitations with external suppliers. Prior to her job at Amazon, Kristi worked multiple research jobs throughout her time at college. Some of the research she has done involved the beneficiation of raw gypsum ore, developing 3D printer filament out of rice straw, and generating code to output graphs from digitized tide data.

Outside of her work, Kristi enjoys exploring the outdoors, whether it be hiking or hammocking at the beach. She also has continued her childhood hobbies of playing piano, basketball, and reading whenever possible. Kristi hopes to encourage and guide other young females interested in STEM through her engineering experiences.