Love on the Brain

Love on the Brain (2022) is a romance novel by Italian author Ali Hazelwood and follows the story of a neuroscientist, Dr. Bee Königswasser, who embarks on a career-high assignment of co-leading a project at NASA but has to contend with working alongside her old grad school nemesis, Levi Ward. As a writer of peer-reviewed scientific articles, Ali Hazelwood writes love stories featuring women in STEM. Her debut novel, The Love Hypothesis (2021), as well as Love on the Brain, were both New York Times Bestsellers. In the context of STEM and academia, Hazelwood explores a number of common romance tropes, as well as the experiences of women in STEM. This guide is based on the 2022 Little, Brown Kindle edition.

Plot Summary

Dr. Bee Königswasser is a neuroscientist working at NIH, who receives a prestigious opportunity to co-lead BLINK, a project at NASA focused on creating helmets for astronauts that improve attention through neurostimulation. Bee is thrilled, except for the fact that she will have to work alongside Levi Ward, an engineer and her old grad school nemesis. Bee flies to Houston to begin the project with her research assistant, Rocío Cortoreal. On the flight, she checks her secret Twitter account, @WhatWouldMarieDo, which she began anonymously some years ago to vent and share about the experiences of women in STEM. The account is named for Bee’s idol, Dr. Marie Curie, the early 19th-century Polish physicist who won a Nobel Prize for her work on radioactivity. Bee regularly interacts and collaborates with another anonymous account, @Schmacademics, the author of which also works in STEM.

Bee and Rocío are given an unofficial tour of their workspace by Guy Kowalsky, an astronaut and long-time collaborator on BLINK, and Bee wonders why Levi is heading the project instead of Guy. While exploring the facility, Bee encounters a kitten, which accidentally knocks over some precariously placed equipment that almost falls on and crushes Bee. She is pushed out of the way at the last minute by Levi before she blacks out.

When Bee formally begins work the next week, she notices that a lot of the equipment and resources she had requested have not yet arrived, and her numerous emails to Levi to meet and discuss BLINK have been going unanswered. This, coupled with his general avoidance of her and the fact that she is kept out of the loop regarding team meetings, leads her to suspect that Levi is intentionally sabotaging her involvement in the project. When Bee’s boss at NIH unfairly holds her accountable for the work not progressing, she confronts Levi and inadvertently discovers that the project is being stalled because of ongoing politics between NIH and NASA. To her surprise, Levi pushes for BLINK to continue, explicitly stating that Bee is the only neuroscientist he wants to collaborate with. He, in turn, is shocked to learn that during grad school, everyone believed that he hated Bee.

Levi finds evidence that another company is working on very similar helmets, forcing their boss, Dr. Boris Covington, to push for the project to continue. With BLINK back on, Levi and Bee began collaborating closely, and she discovers they have much more in common than she had ever imagined. Guy volunteers to be one of the test subjects for BLINK, and Bee appreciates his enthusiasm; he also asks Bee out on a date, but Levi comes to her rescue, telling Guy that she is married. Bee wears her grandmother’s ring for luck, which Levi to point it out to Guy. However, Bee is sure that Levi knows the truth, as her ex-fiancé, Tim, who cheated on Bee with her best friend, Annie, frequently collaborates with Levi on work. While working together one night, Levi and Bee discover a file that has been misplaced on the server among a string of strange occurrences. Levi calls a disciplinary meeting among the engineers despite Bee’s explicit request for him not to, which angers her. Levi quickly apologizes for it, surprising Bee with his sincerity and respectfulness.

In addition to working on BLINK, Bee helps Rocío prepare for the GRE, which Rocío needs to apply for her PhD. In the process, Bee discovers that Rocío’s initial abysmal scores on the test are a result of her being too smart for the test. Kaylee Jackson, the project manager at BLINK, offers to tutor Rocío instead, having recently taken the rest herself. Kaylee rants about the internet hegemony and bias present in the test, which inspires Bee to tweet about it as @WhatWouldMarieDo. The conversation about the GRE goes viral, sparking an entire movement: #FairGraduateAdmissions. Bee and Schmac even team up to write an essay discussing the GRE’s lack of reliability as an admission tool.

Boris sends Levi and Bee to a Human Brain Imaging conference, which their competitor, MagTech, will also be attending, in order to scope out their progress. Bee runs into Annie and Tim there, and Levi discovers the truth about Bee’s broken engagement. At the conference, Annie tearfully apologizes to Bee and attempts to make amends. On their way home, Levi confesses that he has always been attracted to Bee, contrary to what everyone else believed. Back in grad school, Tim had warned Levi to stay away from Bee and encouraged the rumors that Levi disliked her, even as Tim himself had gone on to consistently cheat on Bee throughout their relationship.

Back in Houston, Bee has an inspiration for how to move forward on BLINK; simultaneously, she and Levi finally give in to their mutual attraction and sleep together. Boris is impressed with Bee and Levi’s work and schedules a demo with the higher-ups at NASA and NIH. A couple of days before the demo, Bee discovers that @WhatWouldMarieDo is being accused of hypocrisy by her followers, upon the revelation that the account contacted STC, the seller of the GRE, with a promise of PR services in return for money. Bee also receives an email from STC’s lawyer, threatening legal action. Additionally, despite everything going perfectly during preparation, the demo is a spectacular failure: The helmet ends up giving Guy a seizure. A dejected Bee, sure that she is about to lose her job, prepares to leave Houston. This upsets Levi as he assumed she would stay on in the city for the sake of their relationship. Bee and Levi end things, but Levi leaves behind a pen drive with a surprise on it for Bee. A thoroughly heartbroken Bee moves to message Schmac, then realizes that he is actually Levi, recognizing Levi’s cat from a recent picture Schmac has posted.

Bee watches the video on the pen drive, which contains security footage that has captured the calico kitten from her first day. In the process, she also sees evidence that someone has accessed her Twitter account through her laptop and heads into the lab to investigate, after leaving Levi a message. Guy arrives there unexpectedly, revealing that he was behind not just the Twitter debacle, but the missing files and the fudged protocol at the demo. Resentful that Levi was given the opportunity to lead BLINK, Guy has been finding ways to sabotage the project the entire time. Guy pulls out a gun, threatening to shoot Bee, but she manages to escape. Then, Levi arrives at the lab and tackles Guy just as Bee blacks out. Bee wakes up in the hospital the next day to profuse apologies from Boris, who invites her back to BLINK effective immediately. Levi visits Bee and realized Bee is @WhatWouldMarieDo after seeing the Twitter account open on her laptop in the security footage. After leaving the hospital, Bee reconciles with Levi and takes the kitten from the lab to his place, asking if they can adopt it together. The epilogue reveals that, following the success of BLINK, Levi and Bee take full-time jobs together at NASA and eventually get married.