Ashley Morales Cartagena is the first Latin American woman elected to the board of directors of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), a leading seismic research group in the United States. EERI is the leading non-profit membership organization that connects multidisciplinary professionals dedicated to advancing earthquake resilience.
Morales Cartagena’s election last week raises the bar for young Dominican professionals. She is a disaster risk reduction professional with 15 years of experience working in academia, industry, the public sector and international development. She is a professor and researcher at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), where she served as director for the past four years and founded the EERI PUCMM student chapter. She also served as head of the Disaster Risk Management and Geotechnical Engineering departments at the Domincan Republic’s National Bureau of Seismic Evaluation and Infrastructure Vulnerability (ONESVIE).
Ashley co-chaired the EERI Younger Members Committee from 2019-2021 and received the EERI’s Younger Members Award in 2018. Ashley pursued her graduate studies (MS) as a Fulbright Scholar in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She also holds an MS in Construction Management from the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology (INTEC) and a BS in Civil Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra.
Most recently she founded Mujeres en la Ingeniería (MIRD), the first NGO focused on supporting women to pursue careers in engineering in the Dominican Republic.
Morales Cartagena told reporters that while she is honored by the new position, she most sincerely hopes that this wll serve as motivation for other women to enter the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
During her postgraduate studies at the University of Illinois in Geotechnical Engineering she focused on seismic events.
She is a recipient of various awards in her field from both the EERI and the American Society of Civil Engineers.
20 February 2023