Ageia Hires Qualters As VP Of Engineering

Hardware and software physics tool firm Ageia has announced the appointment of Irene Qualters as vice president of software engineering. Ms. Qualters will be responsible for the full life cycle of software development, including processes and implementation methodologies, for Ageia's PhysX parallel computing architecture, designed to provide hardware-based physics support for video games. With more than 20 years of experience, Ms. Qualters has held a broad range of engineering and technical leadership positions as vice president of Merck & Co., senior vice president of Silicon Graphics and president of Cray Research. As well, she was a distinguished visiting scientist at the NASA/Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She remains active on several technical and scientific advisory boards. During her career, Ms. Qualters has been successful in leading the design, development and support of high performance application and systems software including the operating system, networking and peripheral devices, parallel compilers and user tools. Ms. Qualters holds a MA in Computer Science from the University of Detroit and a BS in Mathematics/Sec. Ed. from Duquesne University. "Clearly hardware physics is the next big thing in gaming. However, the hardware isn’t anything without the software to exploit it,” said Manju Hegde, founder and CEO of Ageia. “Irene has a track record of leadership excellence; we look forward to leveraging her expertise to drive the usability and performance of the PhysX processor.”