Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD is an Associate Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. Her work primarily focuses on trying to tease out the mechanisms that cause ongoing or severe reactions to loss. In particular, she is curious about the neurobiological, immune, and cardiovascular factors that vary between individual grief responses. Dr. O’Connor earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona in 2004. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. She is the author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science, and featured in Newsweek, the New York Times, and The Washington Post.