Carolina Cruz-Neira

Carolina Cruz-Neira is a Spanish-Venezuelan-American computer engineer, known for being the co-inventor and developer of the CAVE automatic virtual environment. She is director of the Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.^[2]

Biography

Carolina Cruz-Neira graduated cum laude with a degree in systems engineering from the Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, Venezuela in 1987. She earned a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1991, and her PhD in 1995, working under computer graphics researcher Thomas DeFanti. For her PhD dissertation, Cruz-Neira designed and developed the CAVE virtual reality system, its specifications and implementation. She also designed and implemented the CAVELib software API, now a commercial product. She was the architect of the Open Source API VR Juggler, an open source virtual reality applications development framework.^[3][4][5]

Cruz-Neira was the Stanley Chair professor in Interdisciplinary Engineering at Iowa State University. She later joined the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and in 2006, was the first CEO and Chief Scientist of LITE (Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise), a Louisiana State initiative to support economic development immersive technologies.^[3] From 2009 to 2014 she was the W. Hansen Hall and Mary Officer Hall/BORSF Endowed Super Chair in Telecommunications in Computer Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 2014 she was named an Arkansas Research Scholar by the Arkansas Research Alliance and moved to Little Rock to lead the Emerging Analytics Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.^[6]

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