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Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira is the Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITETM). She is also the William Hansen Hall Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Until 2005 Dr. Cruz was the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering, and the Associate Director and co-founder of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University (ISU). In 2002, she co-founded and co-directed the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at ISU. Dr. Cruz-Neira's work in virtual reality started with her Ph.D. dissertation, the design of the CAVETM Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVETM Library software specifications and implementation, and preliminary research on CAVETM Supercomputing integration. She shares the recognition of the invention of the CAVE with Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. Since then, her research has been driven by providing applicability and simplicity to VR technology focusing on software engineering for VR, applications of VR technology and usability studies of virtual environments. She spearheaded the open-source VR API movement with the development of VR Juggler, and has been an advocate of best practices on how to build and run VR facilities and applications. Many of her former students are now doing leading work in VR at places such as Purdue University, Navtech, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Deere & Company, Boeing, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Argonne National Laboratory. Beyond her academic career, Dr. Cruz is an entrepreneur. She co-founded Infiscape Corporation, a services company in immersive applications and high-end interactive graphics. She serves in many advisory boards, including Sensics Inc. and Micoy and has performed corporate consulting in many companies around the world. In 1997 Business Week magazine named Dr. Cruz a "rising research star" in the new generation of computer science pioneers. Among her many achievements, Cruz received the Iowa State Foundation Award for Early Achievement in Research in 2000; in 2001 she received the Boeing A.D. Welliver Award; in 2002 she was named Eminent Engineer by the Tau Beta Pi Honors Society; in 2003 she was inducted as a Computer Graphics Pioneer by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization; and, in 2007 she was the recipient of the Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC). Dr. Cruz has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (1995) and a Master's degree in EECS at UIC (1991). She graduated Cum Laude in Systems Engineering at the Universidad Metropolitana at Caracas, Venezuela in 1987. | 