Interview with Dr. Aina Puce, 2023 OHBM Class of Fellows
Author: Naomi Gaggi
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth DuPre, Simon Steinkamp, Lavinia Uscatescu, Kevin Sitek
Dr. Puce shares her journey as part of the OHBM community, including her service as OHBM Chair from 2020-2022.
Dr. Aina Puce is an Eleanor Cox Riggs Professor of Psychological and Brain Science at Indiana University Bloomington. At the 2023 Annual Meeting, she was honored as a Fellow of OHBM for her contributions to the society and her outstanding academic and intellectual leadership. Her research career spans social neuroscience, multimodal neuroimaging (including electroencephalography [EEG] and magnetoencephalography [MEG]), and best practices in neuroimaging. Her book, MEG-EEG Primer—co-authored with Riitta Hari was just released in its second edition in 2023. Her current research focuses on the neural basis of social cognition and nonverbal communication.
Dr. Puce has been very involved in the OHBM organization, including chairing the society through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she has been attending the annual meetings since 1995. In this interview, she talks about her history with OHBM and the positions she had, including her service as OHBM Chair from 2020-2022. She talks about how she navigated several obstacles and changes throughout this time. Dr. Puce lays out lessons learned throughout her career and during her time in the OHBM community—chiefly, that people matter. She highlights how working with her colleagues with whom she has cultivated mutual respect in both scientific and OHBM-related endeavors has been one of the highlights of her career and a major part of her OHBM tenure. She talks about her research and how she is developing a new direction for her work, including integrating her passion for art into science. We are grateful to Dr. Puce for her continued commitment to OHBM, and for taking the time to participate in this blog post. If you’re curious about how OHBM managed during the pandemic and the consequential major changes, her interview has the answers!
Q1: What do you consider the highlight of your career so far?
Aina Puce (AP): It is hard to pin down just one highlight, but I would probably have to say that writing the MEG-EEG Primer with Riitta Hari would be it. Together, we aimed to give the neuroimaging community a useful resource for learning about neurophysiology. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) are typically discussed separately, yet they are two sides of the same coin. This is something neither of us had been able to understand.
Neurophysiological methods are undergoing a resurgence, particularly with new technologies such as portable EEG and MEG performed with optically-pumped magnetometers. This calls for a new community of users who need to learn these methods. The EEG community has traditionally been quite insular and has remained apart from the rest of the neuroimaging community. Therefore, expertise in that area has not been disseminated as widely as it could have been. Unfortunately, this means that new users of the method have been ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and making errors that may have been made decades earlier. In writing the book, we tried to connect new users to instructive literature, both new and ‘ancient’, so that our discipline can continue to grow and progress with fewer hurdles.
Riitta Hari and I were friends before we started the project, and working on this project has really solidified our friendship – in some ways we have become like an old married couple. We never ever thought we would be writing a second edition, but it came out in August 2023! The takeaway from this experience is that the people you work with matter; you do the best work with colleagues with whom you have cultivated mutual respect and genuine affection.
Q2: How has the Organization changed over your tenure?
AP: So much has happened since 1995, and the first Human Brain Mapping meeting in Paris! I was a postdoctoral researcher then and presented our lab’s work on face perception at that historic meeting. That was before it was officially called Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) – that came a couple of years later with David Van Essen’s drafted by-laws providing the cornerstone for OHBM. OHBM to me has always been a family, a tribe, if you will… a tribe that pursues excellent neuroimaging science and methods. I keep going not just because of the science and methods, but because of the community.
I served OHBM in the Council Chair’s role from 2020-2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. I rotated onto Council at the end of the OHBM meeting in Rome in 2019. What a change! From 4,000 people in the chaos of Rome in a summer heatwave, to a 2-year period of the chaos of lockdown and online isolation. We had to pivot rapidly in March 2020 from a fully in-person meeting to a fully online meeting in 3 months. Back then there was no real software for running online conferences and we had to cobble something together quickly. This created many practical problems, with changes being made even during the meeting itself. So much hard work from everyone on Council, Program Committee, Executive Committee, Open Science Special Interests Group (SIG), Student and Postdoc SIG, and BrainArt SIG. We learned what to do and importantly, what not to do.
Fast forward to planning the next OHBM – would this be online or in person? We formed a Technology Task Force, chaired by Alex Fornito in August 2020, to build a workable online platform for a virtual OHBM 2021. Things were moving along, and we were getting to where we wanted to be, working with a company called Sparkle [of Burning Man festival fame] – with Daniel Margulies as Program Chair heavily involved. We ran the online meeting and this showcased the strong points, as well as the weak links, of the online platform. We did better than the previous year, but again we could do better. This was also a wild and crazy ride for me, as OHBM Chair, it felt like we were isolated on Planet Brain and being bombarded by an asteroid field. I saw how hard people were working again on the Council, Program Committee, Executive Committee, Open Science SIG, Student and Postdoc SIG, and BrainArt SIG. The commitment to making a successful meeting was on everyone’s minds. I confess I was worried about the mental and physical health of a number of people at the time.
Fast forward to planning the 2022 Glasgow meeting: would it be in person, online or hybrid? We took a ‘go big or go home’ approach: we went hybrid. Again, March 2022 was the time that the big decision would be made: do we pull the plug on the in person meeting in Glasgow, or not? If not, what protocols do we need to adopt to try to keep OHBM-ers safe from COVID at the meeting?
Back to the hybrid question – the Planet Brain platform was being rejigged with OHBM-ers working together with Sparkle – some big things still needing to be done in March 2022. Things had suddenly gone quiet with Sparkle… Why? None of us knew that the software developers we were working with at Sparkle were in Ukraine. Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. No more needs to be said… Pivot yet again – a new online platform was needed, found & worked for us in the end. This time Randy Gollub was in the hot seat as Council Chair.
And of course, we all went to Glasgow, in the middle of a COVID surge there as it turned out – we did not know this at the time. The mood at the meeting was euphoric because people had not seen each other physically for years. Unfortunately, once the dust settled on the meeting, it was obvious that about 15% of attendees came down with COVID, despite the mask mandate during the meeting. Might things have been done differently? Sure. We can always say that after the fact.
So, how did we change over my tenure? We became super agile and learned to really rely on each other and work together, overcoming different philosophies in our approach to doing science. World geopolitics is going through a particularly turbulent period, so planning and running OHBM meetings has now become more challenging and potentially costly. Why were we able to do this so effectively despite the challenges of the pandemic? Because we are a dynamic and proactive community, one that makes diversity an important priority. Our society continues to grow – we have a number of wonderful SIGs that hold year-round activities. We have a number of specialist committees that tap into Council, and we are run by a truly excellent professional executive office. Despite the mayhem in the world during the last few years, I can say that I am glad to have served in the Council Chair’s role. It put me into close contact with so many wonderful people, who are truly the lifeblood of OHBM. Like I stated before, the people matter…
Q3: If you could start an entirely new research program right now, what would be the most exciting new direction for you to go in?
AP: That is exactly what I am in the process of doing right now! For a number of decades now I have studied the brain bases of non-verbal human interactions. I also became very involved in best practices and reproducibility/reliability in EEG and MEG, which I already mentioned earlier. But currently I have been switching directions completely, so that I can amalgamate my long-standing interests in art with my passion for science.
For 30 years or so, I have been a photographer who has also exhibited and sold her work. My current “thing” that I am experimenting with is cameraless photography. Over the years I have dabbled in ceramics, as well as painting in watercolor, and drawing in pencil and ink. I have always been interested in art and have spent a lot of time in art museums around the world. I am a docent in the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University (EMA), where I run tours for not only university classes, but for the general public as well. For the last couple of years I have taught a course for graduate and undergraduate students entitled “Art & the Brain”, which I teach at EMA. This greatly enriches the course, because we have direct access to the museum’s holdings and as well as curatorial and docent expertise.
To stay true to my neuroscientist roots, however, my lab is going portable: I will be moving my social neuroscience studies into the art museum! I have just acquired portable systems for collecting EEG/ExG and eye tracking data – these devices will allow our research subjects to undertake their art museum adventures untethered. We will look at relationships between effective art experiences and empathy, among other social neuroscience topics. Given the current ‘pandemic of inhumanity’ that we are experiencing in the world, I believe that this is an important topic to study. These are incredibly exciting times for me right now because I will finally be able to pursue my interests in art and science at the same time!