Herta P. Montoya earned her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 2018 from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She currently is a fourth-year PhD student at Purdue with a concentration in structural engineering and a focus on advancing cyber-physical simulation and testing of complex infrastructure systems. She is the recipient of the Purdue Systems Collaboratory Fellowship Program and a research assistant in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, where she is examining the following: extension of a dynamic nonlinear system to a multiple degree-of-freedom physical specimen coupled with servo-hydraulic actuators; technologies needed to establish resilient extra-terrestrial habitats in the NASA-funded Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitats (RETH) institute; and the implementation of real-time hybrid simulation to assess different structural systems. She is the tour committee chair for Purdue’s Bowen Laboratory Student Advisory Council and also has served as co-secretariat for the Asia Europe Pacific Smart Structures Summer School and co-secretariat for the ANCRISST Conference. In summer 2018, she worked as a junior transportation engineer for the Asociación de Consultores en Ingeniería, Honduras. As a future engineering faculty member and researcher, Herta would like to mentor students from different cultural and environmental backgrounds and promote intellectual curiosity, skill development, and teamwork. She hopes to show students that civil and structural engineering can have multiple functionalities and links with other industries.

Research Interests

Cyber-physical testing of civil infrastructure