[1] Joy was educated at Sackville School, East Grinstead,[4] and studied geology at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she graduated with first class honours in 2003.

[7] Joy was a doctoral student at University College London, working on the evolution of the Moon, supervised by Ian Crawford.

[10] D-CIXS was designed by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and could measure elemental abundances of magnesium, aluminium and silicon.

[11] In 2007 Joy was appointed a postdoctoral research fellow at Birkbeck, where she performed mineralogical and geochemical investigations into lunar rock and used this to understand chemical information collected from remote sensing.

[13] By investigating the composition of lunar soil Joy hopes to understand the Moon's bombardment history.