CE grad students Herta Montoya and Wen Tang received first and third place awards, respectively, in the best student paper competition held by the ASCE Structural Health Monitoring and Control Committee at the 2023 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) Conference.

Herta Montoya is a Ph.D. student in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University advised by Professor Shirley Dyke, and received first place for her paper titled Thermomechanical Real-Time Hybrid Simulation: Identification, Control, and Experimental Implementation, co-authored with Christian Silva, Shirley Dyke, and Manuel Salmeron. Herta completed her B.S. in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio in May 2018. Her research focuses on advancing cyber-physical simulation and concurrency platforms to address societal problems, such as infrastructure vulnerabilities around the world and outer space.

Wen Tang is a Ph.D. student in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University advised by Associate Professor Mohammad Jahanshahi, and received third place for his paper titled Active Perception Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robotic Inspection, co-authored with Mohammad Jahanshahi. Wen received his B.S. in the School of Civil Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2017, and his M.S. degree in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. His research interests are AI, computer vision, active perception, and robotic-based information gathering and inspection.