Abstract: The present investigation is focused on the solution of a dynamic inverse problem which is concerned with the assessment of damage in structures by means of measured vibration data. This inverse problem has been presented as a optimization problem and has been solved through the use of the iterative regularization method, i.e. the Conjugate Gradient method. The results have been presented in a satisfactory form when a small structure with few degrees-of-freedom (DOF) is considered, however when a higher DOF-structure is considered, the simple application of the iterative regularization method is not more satisfactory, being necessary the application of an additional methodology. To solve this difficulty, in this paper a new approach, based on the use of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) method has been proposed. The GA method is used to generate a primary solution which is employed as the initial guess for the conjugate gradient method. The application of this new approach has been showed that better results can be achieved, although the computational time for the application here analyzed could be increase. The damage estimation has been evaluated using noiseless and noisy synthetic experimental data, and the reported results are concerned with a truss and a beam-like structures both modeled through a finite element technique. Moreover, in order to take into account the reduced set of experimental data to be employed in the optimization algorithm, a Guyan reduction technique has been adopted on the finite element formulation.