Without knowing it, Kari Byron has been in training to become a MythBuster since she was a kid. By the age of five she was setting up experiments to test on her family and using dolls as crash test dummies. Luckily, her parents always caught her just before her little sister took a ride down a laundry chute or was the subject of an 'around-the-world' attempt on the playground swings.

After graduating from San Francisco State University, Kari began her career as an artist, creating sculptures and painting. She held several successful exhibitions at some of San Francisco's leading galleries. Her sculpting skills and love for odd jobs soon led her into the field of model-making and toy-prototyping, which led to a job with Jamie Hyneman at M5 Industries.

It was at M5 that Kari got her first big break on MythBusters. During the 'vacuum toilet' segment of one of the first episodes (which looked at whether a person could get sucked into an aeroplane toilet), Jamie needed a 3-D scan of someone's bottom, and Kari was in the right place at the right time. The rest is history, although we shouldn't overlook Kari's former job experience as a secret martini shopper, rose delivery driver and her stint posing as a store mannequin to fool shoplifters!