Dr. Lynda Joy Gerry ("Joy") is a researcher working at the intersection of experimental psychology and emerging technologies. She recently completed her PhD in Bioengineering, co-supervised by Psychological Medicine, at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral research investigated how immersive virtual reality (VR) can support compassion, mindfulness, physiological regulation, and reduce distress when confronting the suffering of another person. As part of this work, she developed Equanimity VR, an immersive compassion meditation with breath-pacing cues, as an intervention to help people emotionally and physiologically regulate distress while remaining engaged with the emotional suffering of another person.

Previously, Joy researched ways that VR can be used to enhance interpersonal understanding through various forms of immersive perspective-taking aimed to transmit aspects of embodied perception from one person to another. This mission was realized in projects such as Paint With Me, where users follow a painter's movements (with hand, brush, canvas, and easel tracking) while listening to her describe her creative process, and the Augmented Design to Embody a Piano Teacher (ADEPT), a system where users place their hand inside the virtual "glove" of an expert pianist and follow the fingering movements.

Joy's broader research interestes include mindfulness and compassion-based interventions, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, psychophysiology, phenomenology, perspective-taking, and the use of emerging technologies as tools to facilitate deeper interpersonal understanding.

She has worked across interdisciplinary research environments in around the globe, including the University of Auckland, TU Dresden, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Tallinn University, University of South Australia, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and University of Copenhagen.

Listen to Joy discuss her research on Voices of VR episode 596 with Kent Bye:

Joy has worked in research labs across the globe, including:

The Empathic Computing Lab (2017 - PRESENT), University of Auckland, Auckland Bioengineering Institute - Auckland, New Zealand

IX Lab, Technical University of Dresden (2020-2022) - Dresden, Germany

The Multisensory Experience Lab and the Augmented Cognition Lab, Aalborg University Copenhagen (2017 - 2019) - Copenhagen, Denmark

RITMO - The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Rhythm, Time, and Motion, Univerisity of Oslo (2019) - Oslo, Norway

Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University (2017) - Tallinn, Estonia

The Social Cognition Lab at Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2017) - Berlin, Germany

The Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen (2015 - 2017) - Copenhagen, Denmark

Additionally, Joy works as an Expert AR/VR/MR Research and Design Consultant with companies such as MakeReal (UK), Khora VR (Denmark), Makropol ApS (Denmark), Virtual Reality Denmark (Denmark), Equal Reality (Australia), and Empatica XR (Switzerland).