Alejandro Palacio Betancur received his bachelor’s degree from Universidad Nacional de Colombia in civil engineering in 2016, his master’s degree from the University of Kentucky (UK) in civil engineering in 2020, and currently is a PhD student in civil engineering at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on structural health monitoring and structural control to improve their behavior during natural hazards. His work has produced six first-author peer-reviewed journal papers, and during his first semester as a master’s student, his research was published in Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing. Future exploration will extend to the development, promotion, and implementation of smart structure technology to mitigate multi-hazard effects of natural disasters and cyberattacks. His paper at the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security was the first to identify the vulnerability of smart structures in cyber-attacks. Palacio Betancur is a visitor scientist at Albert-Ludwigs-University, Germany, a founding member of the Structural Engineers Association student chapter at UK, and has been involved in forensic engineering via Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) since 2022. As a student who has cultivated his education across three universities in different countries and demographics, he will be a professor who addresses challenges that arise from cultural differences and diverse personal identities.

Research Interests

Development of Smart Structures Technology