What Happens After We Die? These UVA Researchers Are Investigating It.

When our bodies perish, can our consciousness persist? At the University of Virginia, researchers are searching for answers, one near-death experience at a time.

WRITTEN BY JOAN NIESEN | PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2025

At the eastern edge of downtown Charlottesville—past the red-brick pedestrian mall with its bookstores and fudge shops and busking guitarists, beyond the incongruously modern amphitheater, just as the road begins to slope downhill toward the train tracks and then out toward Monticello—sits an utterly nondescript condo building.

I was there looking for the site of some highly unusual research conducted within the University of Virginia’s medical school. It’s mind-bending, norm-challenging work that explores the metaphysical—which is why I’d expected something a little more mystical. A spiral staircase, an owl, a crystal ball. The divination tower at Hogwarts. Certainly not a mid-rise straight out of Anywhere, USA. Only there it was, visible through the glass front door: a placard in the lobby reading “Division of Perceptual Studies.”

The door handle turned with a wiggle. Upstairs were the researchers I’d come to see, inside an office lined with heaving bookshelves, at wide wooden desks scattered with papers and research journals. They’ve devoted their careers to one of life’s biggest questions: What happens when we die?

The short answer: No one really knows. But the scientists at the Division of Perceptual Studies—DOPS, for short—are doing their best to find out. Founded in 1967, the 14-person group investigates the relationship between life and death, mind and brain, and the tantalizing, albeit woo-woo, possibility that when our physical bodies perish, our consciousness persists.

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