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.
