Hodge is an associate professor and the Philip and Cayley MacDonald Early Career Chair in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, with a joint appointment at the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, at the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to her position in academia, she worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a staff scientist from 2004 to 2007, and as a postdoctoral fellow from 2002 to 2004. Hodge received her Ph.D. in materials science from Northwestern University.

Hodge leads the materials nanotechnology group at USC, which includes a physical vapor deposition processing lab and a nanomechanics lab. Her research interests range from processing of nanocrystalline and nanoporous materials to nanomechanics of metals and biomaterials. She is an active member of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), The Materials Research Society (MRS), and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE). She received the TMS Young Leader Award in 2004; a National Science Foundation (NSF) Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) award in 2008; an NSF CAREER Award in 2010; and Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA) in 2012. Hodge has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters.