Professor Mary-Frances O’Connor

Mary-Frances O’Connor is a renowned grief expert and neuroscientist, whose ground-breaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve provide a new model for understanding love, loss, and learning. In The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible as she explains the different ways we ‘encode’ love and grief: our neurons help us form attachments to those we love, leaving our brains at a loss when we are bereaved and have to come to terms with a future in which they are no longer physically with us. Her follow-up book The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing again brings together scientific research and personal stories, this time focusing on the effect of grief on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications this has for our long-term well-being. It asks: What happens in our bodies when we’re grieving? How do our coping behaviours affect our physical health? Can we die of a broken heart?

James R. Doty praises The Grieving Body as ‘a profound and compassionate guide to understanding how grief manifests in the body and how healing can occur on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level’. Megan Devine finds it ‘Deeply human and wise’; Mary-Frances ‘doesn’t just explain what happens and why, she offers hopeful, beautiful solutions to support ourselves and our world’.

A Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona, Mary-Frances also directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. Her TEDx talk, ‘How do our brains handle grief?’ has been watched over 187,000 times.