Kristina Shea is a mechanical engineer whose research topics include generative design, tensegrity structures, aquatic soft robotics,[1] and 4D printing.
[3] Shea studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1993, master's in 1995, and PhD in 1997.
[3] Her doctoral dissertation, Essays of Discrete Structures: Purposeful Design of Grammatical Structures by Directed Stochastic Search, was supervised by Jonathan Cagan.
[4] She came to Switzerland as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in the Applied Computing and Mechanics Laboratory of the Department of Civil Engineering.
She became a lecturer in engineering design at the University of Cambridge, and then from 2005 to 2012 she was a professor of virtual product development at the Technical University of Munich, before taking her present position at ETH Zurich.