September 2005: Balsells Fellow receives Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Maria Cruz Villa Uriol, a 2000 Balsells fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Irvine has successfully defended her Ph.D dissertation and received her Ph.D degree from UCI in September of 2005. Maria Cruz, a graduate from La Salle School of Engineering in Barcelona developed a thesis on Video-Based Avatar Reconstruction and Motion Capture. Hers is the 5th Ph.D degree received by a Balsells fellow and the second woman to do so. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Visualization and Interactive Systems Group at UCI. Eventually, she plans to return to Catalonia to pursue an academic and research career.