Rate My Professor Yi Li

Dr. Yi (Joy) Li serves as Associate Professor of Game Design and Development in the Department of Software Engineering and Game Development at Kennesaw State University, where she also directs the Realities Lab. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Louisville in 2018 and joined Kennesaw State University as an assistant professor of Computer Game Design and Development. Her academic career focuses on leveraging interactive technologies for therapeutic and educational applications. Li's research specializations include affective gaming in healthcare, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and gamification for education. She applies gaming tools to support rehabilitation training and interventions for mental disorders, collaborating with K-12 schools, universities, and medical institutions.

Li has secured significant funding for her projects, including an NSF CRII grant for developing an adaptive VR system that uses 'impossible experiences' to improve learning abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder. She also received an NSA GenCyber grant for a cybersecurity awareness training program integrated into game play for middle school students, promoting interest in cybersecurity careers and online ethics. Other key initiatives encompass VR-based empathy training for medical students, such as a Parkinson’s disease simulation in partnership with Augusta University Medical School, now part of their curriculum and covered by local media including WSB-TV in 2020. Her work on depression prevention employs VR and motion feedback to foster cognitive empathy, while depression detection projects use VR games to elicit and evaluate emotional responses through mini-games and self-reports. Li's scholarly contributions feature publications in leading conferences, including 'Parkinson’s Disease Simulation in Virtual Reality for Empathy Training in Medical Education' (2021, IEEE VRW), 'Depression Prevention by Mutual Empathy Training: Using Virtual Reality as a Tool' (2021, IEEE VRW), 'Depression Detection Using Virtual Reality: A Literature Review' (2021, HICSS), 'Affective Virtual Reality Game for Depression Symptoms Detection Using Psychophysiological and Behavioral Measures' (2020, ISNR), and 'Virtual reality with psychophysiological monitoring as an approach to' (2017, Autism Imaging and Devices). Her research has accumulated over 990 citations, demonstrating impact in extended reality applications for health and education.