Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Social neuroscientist Aina Puce, the Eleanor Cox Riggs Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences is a self-described “science nerd and art enthusiast,” as fully engaged in state-of-the- art science as she is in the scientific study of visual arts. She got her early scientific training in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in applied science from Swinburne University of Technology, specializing in biophysics and physics respectively. This no doubt laid the groundwork for the remarkable expertise in the many technologies she has used to measure and analyze the brain’s activity: EEG, MEG, TMS, fMRI, and eye tracking, among others. She went on to attain a Ph.D. in medicine at the University of Melbourne conducting neurophysiological research on the use of sensors implanted in the brain to locate epileptic seizures.

Puce further pursued this work during her postdoctoral studies at the Yale University School of Medicine Department of Neurosurgery, enabling surgeons to identify the function of brain regions close to those causing seizures in patients preparing for epilepsy surgery. There she would also strike out on the work that would define her future career. As her longtime colleague, Distinguished Professor Olaf Sporns describes it, this was “her pioneering multimodal work in face perception,” identifying face sensitive brain regions and the complex flow of information among them to understand the role of face perception in social interactions. During that time, said Sporns, Puce and her colleagues produced “a series of extraordinary back-to-back papers,” in which they began to outline for the first time how the brain interprets facial movement and expression.

As fMRI neuroimaging technology was emerging, Puce’s team produced the first fMRI studies of the brain areas responsive to facial movement. That was in 1995. “We were doing multiple methods to study the same kinds of things,” Puce explains. “The different methods gave us different information, and everything came together and was consistent. And that’s how we could build up a picture of what was happening in the brain.”

Puce would go on to investigate numerous aspects of facial perception, among them gaze direction and social attention, audio-visual integration, the role of hand and body movements in understanding emotions, and many other topics.

Following her work at Yale, Puce returned to Melbourne and the Swinburne University of Technology in 1998 as an associate professor, and in 2000 became deputy director at the Brain Sciences Institute. She came back to the U.S. in 2002 as a professor and the director of Neuroimaging at the West Virginia University School of Medicine Center for Advanced Imaging. Then in 2008 she joined the IU faculty as director of the Imaging Research Facility and Eleanor Cox Riggs Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, pursuing her research as director of the Social Neuroscience Lab.

Alongside her scientific career, Puce is an art enthusiast with a deep knowledge and affinity for visual art. A photographer for over thirty years, she has developed her craft and artistic vision intently and shown her work in local galleries. Art has also become the focus of her scientific work. “Art,” as she puts it, “hijacks the visual system” – and she has begun to explore precisely how that occurs, bringing her portable lab complete with infra-red eye tracking tools into the galleries of the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art to study how we look at art.

She conceived and taught a course held in the IU museum, Art and the Brain, which covers a range of topics at the intersection of neuroscience and art: the brain’s visual and motor systems on which making and viewing art depend, the scientist and artist’s shared preoccupations with the perception of faces and bodies, motion and emotion, as well as the impact of mental and physical disabilities on artists and their work. She and her co-author Riitta Hari, a retired fellow neuroscientist and art lover who now is based in a university art department in Finland, are currently writing a book related to this course material for Oxford University Press. In 2017 the two published an MEG-EEG Primer for OUP now in its second edition and translated into Japanese.

Enormously devoted to her teaching and her students, Puce received the IU Trustees Teaching Award in 2022. In 2021 she served as a Fellow in the Global Classroom Program at IU, partnering with the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile to teach cross-cultural social neuroscience classrooms. She is a Fellow of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and more recently the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Olaf speaks for all her colleagues when he says how her compassionate, engaged, and generous spirit will truly be missed. “With her leadership and creative approach to science and teaching, Puce has not only reshaped the foundations of our field, but she has also made a huge positive difference in the careers of so many students and trainees.”

The good news, however, is that she will still be around – almost as busy in the pursuit of art and science as she ever was – and continuing her collaborations and contributions to these fields among her many beloved colleagues.