Kristen Henry operates a 3D printer building a house.

Courtesy of Kristen Henry

Kristen Henry is the 24-year-old chief technology officer of 3D printed home company Sq4d.
She graduated from Yale University in 2021, got a job at Sq4d, and earned a quick promotion.
She said being enthusiastic and getting her hands dirty helped her get ahead.

Kristen Henry is one of the youngest people in the world to 3D print a house.

Less than a year after she graduated from college, and became a mechanical engineer, she operated a printer that built a two-bedroom cement home on Long Island. The task took 80 hours and was completed within weeks. 

After seeing how Henry threw herself into operating — and refining — the printer for Sq4d, the company promoted her to chief technology officer. She was 22. 

Now, at 24, she spends her days modifying and improving the 3D printer so that builders everywhere can use it to construct homes at a faster and more affordable rate, taking pressure off an undersupplied housing market throughout the country, she told Insider. 

“The technology really has to be simple enough to be understandable, but also reliable and complex enough to handle all the challenges you see on a construction site,” she said.

Born to be an engineer

Henry has had an engineer’s mind since she was a child growing up in Cornwall, New York, a town of 12,600 located in the Hudson Valley, about an hour north of New York City. 

She was the middle child in a family of three girls and her parents were both school teachers. 

“I was always the one who helped my dad out with the manual labor, tinkering around with tools in the shop and everything,” Henry said.

As a child she kept a running list of things she wanted to make better, from umbrellas to refrigerators. Once, she built …read more

Source:: Businessinsider