Princeton engineers are working closely with neuroscientists to understand how visual information and words are encoded in the brain.

In a five-year collaboration, a team led by Princeton’s Peter Ramadge, chair and the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of electrical engineering, and James Haxby, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, have found common patterns in data from brain scans, called fMRI, that reveal brain activity as people perform tasks. The researchers are solving a long-standing challenge of comparing one person’s brain activity to another, which until now has been difficult because both the anatomy and functional processes of each person’s brain are different.

In one recent result, published in the journal Neuron, the researchers had subjects watch the entire movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark” while undergoing fMRI scans and used the data to derive a “common neural code” for how the brain recognizes complex visual images. Based on data from the first half of the movie, the researchers were able to predict, using only a person’s fMRI results, what scene he or she was watching in the second half of the movie.

Ramadge said the collaboration has not only revealed deep insights for neuroscience but has pushed the limits of the engineering techniques in ways that could be useful in many other areas. “It’s been a two-way street,” he said.

Ramadge attributed the success in part to weekly interdisciplinary meetings initiated by Jonathan Cohen, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

“It’s been a great way for my students and me to learn the language of neuroscience,” Ramadge said.

In a separate project, computer scientist David Blei and neuroscientist Ken Norman also are using fMRI data to understand how word meanings are represented in the brain and how these meanings shape memory retrieval. The researchers are showing how the meanings of words that were presented recently can linger in the brain and serve as a mental context that time-stamps memories, so that memories evoke words and vice versa. The work may aid the development of technologies for diagnosing and remediating memory problems.

Biologists have long been fascinated by the first moments when cells divide to become complex tissues and organisms. Now engineers — with an eye toward treating cancer and regenerating tissue — are increasingly joining the hunt for the quantitative principles and underlying mathematics that determine how these processes succeed or fail.

Stanislav Shvartsman Ph.D. ’99, a professor of chemical and biological engineering who also holds an appointment in Princeton’s Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, is developing statistical approaches to understanding the way chemicals spread signals across an embryo. Shvartsman and colleagues published a breakthrough in this work Oct. 17 in the journal Development.

In the lab of Celeste Nelson, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, Cecillia Lui ’11 recently turned her senior thesis into a peer-reviewed article on the mechanics of stem-cell differentiation in breast tissue, which could have implications for understanding breast cancer. Another former undergraduate, Jay Kwak ’09, is co-author with Nelson of a new study revealing that normal lung-tissue development is governed by a single mathematical equation.

In the same department, Assistant Professor Clifford Brangwynne focuses on a cell component called the nucleolus, a loose confederation of proteins and RNA that produces the hardware that builds cells from the inside out. A long-term goal is to tune the properties of this tiny bioreactor to adjust cell growth, which could be useful in battling the runaway expansion that characterizes cancer.