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Mary- Frances O'Connor, PhD is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab

Biography
O'Connor was born in 1973 in Boulder, CO, USA. She attended Northwestern University and graduate school at the University of Arizona. She earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona in 2004 and a fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she held a faculty appointment at UCLA. She returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA, and a faculty position at UCLA.

Professional History
Mary-Frances O’Connor conducts studies to better understand the grief process both psychologically and physiologically. She is a leader in the field of prolonged grief, a clinical condition in which people do not adjust to the acute feelings of grief and show increases in yearning, avoidance, and rumination. Her work primarily focuses on trying to tease out the mechanisms that cause this ongoing and severe reaction to loss. In particular, she is curious about the neurobiological, immune, and cardiovascular factors that vary between individual responses to grief.

Her research focuses on the neurobiological grief response to loss with function neuroimaging, cognitive tasks, and clinical interviews. As a neuroscientist, O'Connor takes the approach that "grieving can be thought of as a form of learning "

O'Connor also researches difficulties adapting following the death of a loved one, termed prolonged grief. She believes that a clinical science approach toward the experience and physiology of grief can improve psychological treatment.

O'Connor contributes to work demonstrating that bereavement is a health disparity. Life expectancy is shorter in the Black community for example, but what is less understood is the emotional toll those statistics have on Black Americans, who lose loved ones more frequently and at younger ages. With Black Americans leading shorter and sicker lives, it's likely they are also experiencing grief more often and earlier in life, making bereavement a health disparity of its own, suggests new University of Arizona Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

In 2020, she organized a multidisciplinary research group called the Neurobiology of Grief International Network (NOGIN). Under her leadership, the group has held four international conferences supported by the National Institute on Aging. O'Connor is a highly sought-after speaker, giving numerous talks and workshops to community orginizations around the world, including to healthcare professionals, medical residents, and volunteers at medical centers and hospices. She has authored research papers published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, from American Journal of Psychiatry to Psychological Science. Dr. O'Connors work has been discussed in the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Scientific American

F

O'Connor conducted the first fMRI neuroimaging study of bereavement, published in 2003.

Honors and Awards

 * NPR SciFri Book Club Pick
 * Next Big Idea Club's "Top 21 Psychology Books of 2022"
 * Behavioral Scientists Notable Books of 2022
 * Fellow, Association for Psychological Science, 2019

Books
Dr. O'Connor's recent book, the Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss(2022; HarperOne) has garnered praise from peers and literary critics alike and has led to speaking engagements around the world.