After graduating, Hodges enrolled in Elon University, and subsequently earned his Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Mathematics.
Hodges then enrolled in North Carolina State University and earned his Master's Degree in Computer Science in 1982, then his doctorate in 1988.
In 1993, Hodges organized team a of clinicians and computer scientists to investigate the effectiveness of virtual reality as a treatment for various phobias.
[1] In 1995, this team published the seminal paper Effectiveness of computer-generated (virtual reality) graded exposure in the treatment of acrophobia in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The paper was the first published report of a controlled study on the use of virtual reality (VR) for psychotherapy in the psychiatric literature and received widespread media attention, including an announcement of the paper’s results on CBS Evening News[2] the day the journal article was released and follow-up stories in a number of venues, including Scientific American Frontiers,[3] CNN, Dateline NBC, Good Morning America, US News & World Report, MIT Technology Review,[4] Discover, and the New York Times.