Dr. Alesandra C. Morales-Vélez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Associate Dean of Students and HACU-Liaison at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). She obtained her BS (2007) and MS (2010) degrees from the same institution and later a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2014) at the University of Rhode Island. She received the Dwight David Eisenhower Fellowship as an undergraduate (2006), the Department of Energy Fellowship as a graduate student (2008) and the University of Rhode Island Transportation Center Fellowship as a PhD student (2010). She joined the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez faculty in March 2015 as a member of the Geotechnical Engineering Group. She is now the Chair of the Geotechnical Engineering Laboratories. In 2018, she served as the UPRM Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Her main research interests are field reconnaissance after extreme events, monitoring soil properties using remote sensing techniques, liquefaction of unique soils such as calcareous sands and non-plastic dilatant silts, short-and-long-term durability properties of crushed limestone aggregate and linking laboratory and field behavior of soils using shear wave velocity. Her first PhD student graduated in 2019. She has volunteered in two earthquake reconnaissance teams (Mexico 2018 and Puerto Rico 2020) and one hurricane reconnaissance team (Hurricanes Irma and María in Puerto Rico 2018). She is a member of ASCE and GEER and co-editor of “Revista Internacional de Desastres Naturales, Accidentes e Infraestructura Civil”.