Ronald D. Kriz
Director of CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) Facility
Virginia Tech
Since you are interested in flight, do you have your pilot's license?
Yes. When I was in graduate school at Virginia Tech, I spent my summers working at NASA Langley in Hampton, Virginia. At Langely, I finally earned enough money to get my private pilot's license.
When I was 13 years old, I began building wood gliders, and when I could afford the equipment, radio-controlled gliders. This fascination with flying made me want to understand why planes fly. I studied aeronautical engineering at California Polytechnic State University, where one of my senior projects was to build and fly a spruce wood sailplane. This interest in lightweight planes lead to my first job in aerospace design, building lightweight aircraft structures on the B-1 bomber.
I continued studying aeronautical design in graduate school at Virginia Tech, where I used supercomputers to model structural dynamics. As computers got bigger and faster, they generated huge volumes of numbers to the point where graphics became the only method to analyze complex engineering problems.
Today I am the director of Virginia Tech's CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) facility, which is like a virtual reality theater to visualize scientific problems.
Web Links
To learn more about my research, visit these Web sites:
