Mary-Frances O'Connor

Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD, is a neuroscientist and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. She helps direct the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab. O'Connor is a pioneer in the field of "nutritional neuroscience" of grief, studying what happens to the brain when we lose a loved one.\n\nShe is the author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. Dr. O'Connor argues that grief is not just an emotion; it is a learning process. The brain has encoded the loved one as "here," and when they die, the brain must painfully rewire its map of the world. Her work explains why grief feels like brain damage—because, in a way, it is a massive neural reconstruction.