Héctor J. Cruzado is the head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Land Surveying of Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR). He also is the associate director of the Transportation Infrastructure Research Center (TIRC) of PUPR. He has a bachelor of science in civil engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, a master of science with an emphasis on structural engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in wind science and engineering from Texas Tech University.

For his thesis, he assessed the design of the rail transit elevated guideway for the Puerto Rico metro system. Meanwhile, for his dissertation, Cruzado conducted both full-scale experiments and wind tunnel test on wind-induced vibrations of cantilever traffic signal structures. At PUPR, Cruzado regularly teaches structural engineering courses to graduate and undergraduate students. He has supervised the final project of 20 graduate students that completed their master’s degree, with many of the projects being related to the use of recycled materials in concrete mixtures.

In 2009, he successfully chaired the 11th Americas Conference on Wind Engineering convened by the American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE), which was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Cruzado was a board member of AAWE and was its newsletter editor from 2012 to 2018.