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Dr. Carolina Cruz is the Executive Director and Chief Scientist at the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) and holds an Endowed Professorship in the Computer Engineering department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is also one of the founders of Infiscape Corporation and is its current VP for Business Development.Until March 2006, Dr. Cruz was the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering and a Professor in the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department. From 1999 to 2005 she was 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. Many of her former students are now virtual reality (VR) and interactive systems pioneers at places such as Purdue University, Navtech, Electronic Arts, Disney, Deere & Company, Sony Pictures, and Boeing. Dr. Cruz-Neira's work in VR started with her Ph.D. dissertation, which was the design and development of the CAVE Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVE Library software specifications and implementation, and preliminary research on CAVE-Supercomputing integration. 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 in science, engineering, and art, as well as usability studies of practical virtual environments. In 1997 she was featured by Business Week magazine as a "rising research star" in the new generation of computer science pioneers. In March of 2000 Dr. Cruz received the Iowa State Foundation Award for Early Achievement in Research. In June 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. | 