Amy Chambers, a car enthusiast even before she entered The Cooper Union in September 2012, today works as a dynamometer engineer for General Motors Performance Power Units, developing the new power unit for Cadillac’s Formula 1 program. It’s a dream job but one she methodically pursued since her early days at Cooper when she joined the school’s Formula SAE club, which designs, builds, and races a car. “When I started freshman year that team was six people in a basement trying to do what they can, like, ‘Grab a roll of duct tape: we need to put a car together!’ By the time I left senior year, that team was 50 people; we had a real organizational structure.”

Besides the Formula SAE club and her Cooper professors (“Melody Baglione is a queen”), Chambers found SWE a terrific source of professional support. Soon after she graduated, she was invited to speak at her Long Island high school about pursuing a degree in STEM. She was asked about being female in a male-dominated field, and, as she recalls today, she dismissed the question as irrelevant. “At the end of the day, it was defensiveness. I just said, ‘Being a woman engineer is just like being an engineer. I'm doing all the same things that the guys do.’ It was so naïve.” Today, she’d answer the question differently.  SWE not only provided her with professional contacts, she says, but with a resource for dealing with some of the challenges of being a woman in automotive engineering, what she calls “an emotional support system.”

Soon after graduation, Chambers moved to Michigan to work for General Motors, finishing her six years there as Lead Powertrain Noise and Vibration Performance Engineer for the C8 Corvette. “I always like to say I have the very transferable skill of being able to listen to two Corvette engines and tell you what's wrong with them,” she joked during a recent interview. She says she’s faced little overt discrimination and has found her supervisors and colleagues to be supportive. Still, old expectations die hard and at times when she’s been leading a team, she’s occasionally found that others assume a male colleague is the one in charge.

She loved working at Corvette, but in 2022, she left to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School. The experience was enlightening: “When I went to Harvard, I met amazing women: all of a sudden I'm in a classroom where 50% of the students are women, and I was thinking, ‘Whoa, I have been missing a lot of perspective.’” 

Chambers worked as a consultant after graduating but found it highly unsatisfying. The experience led to an intense period of soul searching that found her leaving work that, while paying well, offered little professional pleasure. “It’s about passion. I knew I needed to go back to automotives.” So, she and her husband, Robert Walsh—another mechanical engineer who also graduated from Cooper in 2016—moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where last February she joined GM Performance Power Units LLC, which is dedicated to developing cutting-edge hybrid and electric powertrains for Cadillac's Formula 1 program. As a dynamometer engineer, she constantly runs speed and torque tests on engines being developed for Cadillac’s Formula 1 race car. Cadillac has never before participated in Formula 1, but was recently approved to take part starting in 2026. Initially, the team will use a Ferrari motor. But by 2029, they’ll use the engines being developed by Chambers and her colleagues.

She announced the new gig on her LinkedIn page, “Here’s to pursuing passions, new beginnings, and hopefully some fast cars in 2025.”