Carolina is the chief scientist of LITE and the William Hansen Hall Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is also a member of the Board of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce and a member of the State of Louisiana Hazard Mitigation Advisory Board.

Until 2005, Carolina 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. Carolina's work in VR started with her PhD dissertation, the design of the CAVET Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVET Library software specifications and implementation and preliminary research on CAVET Supercomputing integration. She is known as the co-inventor of the CAVE and the original developer of the CAVELibs. Since then, her research is 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. She serves on numerous advisory boards for research centers around the world as well as for federal and international funding organizations. Many of her former students are now doing leading work in VR at places such as Purdue University, Navteq, Nintendo, EA, Deere & Company, Boeing, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Argonne National Laboratory.

Beyond her academic career, Carolina is a business entrepreneur. She was raised in her family business, an international fashion wholesale and retail importing company, with the expectation of her running the firm once she came of age. But computers caught her interest and led her to obtain degrees in computer science and systems engineering. Combining her business upbringing with her knowledge of technology, she worked on launching technology businesses. She co-founded Glass House Studio, a company dedicated to create virtual experiences and she also co-founded Infiscape Corporation, a services company in immersive applications and high-end interactive graphics. She serves on many advisory boards, including Sensics Inc. and Mersive and Micoy and has performed corporate consulting for many companies around the world. In 1997, Business Week magazine named Carolina a "rising research star" in the new generation of computer science pioneers.

Among her many achievements, Carolina received the 1999 Motorola VIP Software Engineer recognition, the 2000 Iowa State Foundation Award for Early Achievement in Research, in June 2001 she received the Boeing A.D. Welliver Award, in 2002 she was inducted as 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).

Carolina 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. Additionally, she was an accomplished classical ballet dancer performing with several dance groups in Spain, Venezuela and the U.S.

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