Biography

Cynthia Calongne, D.CS, known as Lyr Lobo, Professor in the College of Business and Technology teaches computer science at Parker University in Dallas, Texas. She is an XR/VR faculty champion.

Dr. Calongne conducts research at Virtual Harmony and is an author and speaker with over 337 conference presentations. Her research colleague, Dr. Andrew Stricker, designed a virtual reality app that is approved for beta testing on the Oculus Quest 2 (Meta).

She received the Thinkerer award at the 2017 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education for her commitment to learning and to helping others grow stronger in 3D immersive environments.

In 2010, her team won the $25,000 grand prize in the Federal Virtual World Challenge for their Mars Expedition Strategy Challenge, a space simulation, which led to her collaboration with Will Wright on the participatory design of a TV series called Bar Karma. Will Wright is well-known for his designs of Electronic Arts games The Sims© and SimCity©, and Spore©.

She served as a leader in the ISTE’s Games and Simulations Network, SIG Innovative Learning Technologies, and the Virtual Enviroinments Network.

She organizes the annual OpenSimulator Community Conference, serves as Education Chair of the Nonprofit Commons Board, and serves on the TCC Hawai'i Worldwide Conference Board.

In 2007-2009, she mentored 400-1000 8th grade students with Peggy Sheehy at Suffern Middle School's Ramapo project on Second Life’s Teen Grid and supported immersive roleplay game designs for literary writing studies and libraries for Oregon's CLIVE project.

In 2005, she served as an external evaluator on an artificial intelligence and simulation research National Science Foundation grant as for San Juan College.