A student engineer, building the habits of a professional one.

I’m Eli Shamis, studying Aerospace Engineering at Purdue University. What pulls me toward engineering is aeronautics and its application to race-car design — the question of how you shape something so that it moves air, carries load, or goes faster, doing exactly what it needs to and nothing it doesn’t.

That interest took me to the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One team, where I spent nearly three years in a high-school research apprenticeship studying aerodynamics in CATIA and CFD. It’s also why I became a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol — I wanted to be around flight, not just read about it.

I work primarily in CAD, and I’ve deliberately pushed my range from fully-constrained parametric parts to free-form, curvature-continuous surfaces. The through-line is a bias toward iteration: I’d rather model something, find where it breaks, and rebuild it cleaner than defend a first attempt. My goal is an internship in the racing or defense industry, where that discipline pays off.

This past summer I led a racing program at Sim1Racing, building the curriculum and coaching young drivers by reading their lap-time telemetry and racing data to find exactly where each one could go faster.