Lynda Joy Gerry

writer and thinker

As an academic researcher, my goal is design studies bridging the cognitive neuroscience of empathy with the phenomenology of selfhood and embodiment. Specifically, I explore the capacity for virtual environments to facilitate empathic communication and to stimulate creativity. Augmented reality has been the platform to really call to me as an artist, as for me it is the first truly experiential medium that harnesses the power of our cognitive and bodily systems to allow us to simulate and share new modes of being in the world towards what I believe can be and want to pave as a more empathic world.

As a self-starter with a proven track record of autodidactic propensities across a broad range of skill sets, I thrive in environments challenge my creative problem-solving ingenuity and stimulate my intellectual rigor. I excel in statistical analyses, data visualizations (charts, tables, graphs, and figures), telling a story with data, and being forward-thinking in generating insights that pave the way for future research. When I’m not being a fast-thinking academic, I teach community based yoga, pranyama, and meditation classes.

My long-term goal in my life is to integrate the structure of scientific investigation with the exploration of the first-person, embodied mode of what it is like to have an experience. While the scale of this ambition is huge, I aim to collaborate with philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and other experts to develop a method suitable for the objective sciences but more encompassing of the total lived experience of the individual.