Toward a Biopsychosocial Understanding of Grief: Recent Advances and Innovations in Prolonged Grief Research

Donald J. Robinaugh received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015 under the mentorship of Dr. Richard McNally. Since 2018, he has worked as a clinical psychologist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders and Complicated Grief Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Robinaugh’s research is primarily focused on using computational psychiatry and the tools of network science to investigate mental disorders as complex systems. He is especially focused on applying these tools in the context of anxiety disorders and complicated grief.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, 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.

Matteo Malgaroli, PhD, is an Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Sydney Friedman, MA, is a PhD Candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Naomi Simon’s major clinical and research interests include optimizing initial and next step psychotherapy and medication treatments for anxiety and stress related disorders and understanding the presentation and the biological impact of trauma, loss and anxiety disorders. She has served as a principal investigator or co-investigator on numerous studies aimed at improving our understanding and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and the syndrome of complicated grief. As Chief Medical Officer at Home Base, she guided development of a novel clinical care model and the Home Base Training Institute through a public private partnership with MGH and the Red Sox Foundation to address the unmet needs of returning veterans and their families impacted by deployment related stress, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury.