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Two civil engineering graduates who have made their mark in the world will be honored as Distinguished Engineers by Jerome J. Lohr College of Education at South à£à£Ö±²¥Ðã State University April 22.

Selected as the 2025 Distinguished Engineers are Marsia Geldert-Murphey and Maj. Gen. Richard Heitkamp.

Geldert-Murphey, a 1992 graduate who lives in Glen Carbon, Illinois, served as global president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2024. Heitkamp, a 1991 graduate, currently of Washington, D.C., served as deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during his more than 40-year military career.

The pair will be honored at the April 22 Engineering à£à£Ö±²¥Ðãs Banquet in Volstorff Ballroom in the University Student Union on the SDSU campus. The 6:30 p.m. reception will be followed by the 7 p.m. dinner. The awards, which includes recognition of faculty and staff excellence awards and scholarship recipients, follow the dinner.

Tickets are available for the general public and must be purchased by April 10 through the college’s website: /jerome-j-lohr-engineering/engineering-scholarship-banquet-registration-form.

For questions on tickets, contact the college’s event coordinator, Jenny Bickett, at 605-688-6792 or jenny.bickett@sdstate.edu.

Geldert-Murphey

Geldert-Murphey, who was born in Inglewood, California, was primarily raised in Rapid City and survived the Rapid City Flood as an 8-year-old. She came to SDSU as a nontraditional student determined to be a good student after a disastrous start to college several years earlier at the University of South à£à£Ö±²¥Ðã.

She was on the dean’s list at SDSU. In addition to going to school full time and working 20 hours per week at the Brookings wastewater treatment plant, Geldert-Murphey served as a lab technician for Chuck Tiltrum’s transportation survey class. She also followed Tiltrum’s directive that students get involved in the SDSU chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She served as corresponding secretary and arranged for meeting speakers.

Geldert-Murphey remained active in the organization as a professional, which included eight years with the Illinois Department of Transportation, six years with SCI Engineering, where she was a vice president; nine years as owner of two different engineering firms and her current position as regional director for Lochmueller Group.

She was serving on the national American Society of Civil Engineers board when she was asked to run for president of the society.

Geldert-Murphey was president-elect in 2023, president in 2024 and currently is past president while also working full time with Lochmueller.

Heitkamp

Heitkamp, an Adrian, Minnesota, native joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in December 1984 during his senior year at Adrian High School. He had finished basic training by the time he enrolled at SDSU in fall 1985.

He was identified by then-Dean Ernest Buckley as a student who could help promote a number of his initiatives, including the Phon-a-Thon, the Dean’s Advisory Council, Impulse magazine, Student-Originated Research and Design, the Joint Engineering Council, Brookings Business Incubator and the Intro to Engineering orientation class.

Working in a much different era, Heitkamp had a key to the dean’s office and was tabbed by Buckley to join him in Pierre while he was interim executive director of the South à£à£Ö±²¥Ðã Board of Regents.

The first 15 years of Heitkamp’s military career focused on warfare engineering. In December 2012 he was assigned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

He led construction efforts around the globe, including in Korea and the Pacific, Central America, and the Army’s construction programs in Southwest Asia, including Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq. 

His biggest challenge came with the Army’s largest construction project since the Panama Canal, the U.S. southern border protection projects.  

The $18 billion program stretched over four states to secure the U.S. border. Based on his successes with the program, he was selected to serve as the Army’s deputy chief of engineers and deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  

Today he is commandant of the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C., which is the premier senior service college of the Organization of American States, the world’s oldest regional organization that brings together all 35 independent states of the Americas.