Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, a pioneering neuroscientist and leading expert on the sense of touch, passed away August 11. He was 49 years old.
Bensmaia, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, explored how sensory information about touch, texture, and the shape of objects is represented in the nervous system and brain, which in turn generates human perception of the world. He then used these discoveries to help develop prosthetic limbs that can restore a realistic sense of touch to amputees and paralyzed patients.
His lab generated algorithms for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that convert the output of sensors on bionic hands into patterns of stimulation that can be transmitted through electrodes implanted in the brain. Using what he called a “biomimetic” approach, he and his team sought to mimic the biological processes underlying how the nervous system communicates signals from the arms and hands to create natural-feeling sensations of touch and give bionic limbs greater dexterity.
“Sliman was a driving force and real inspiration to others,” said Michael Coates, PhD, chair of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy. “His research group was thriving in a phenomenal way, absolutely bursting at the seams with talented students and postdocs working on fundamental science for wonderfully thoughtful and constructive projects. While his work was intrinsically fascinating, he was just as thoughtful, sincere, and conscientious about supporting everyone around him.”
Bensmaia’s lab published a series of groundbreaking studies in 2013 and 2015 that provided blueprints for incorporating realistic sensory feedback into prosthetic limbs. Through experiments with non-human primates, they identified patterns of neural activity that occur naturally as the animals manipulate objects—and successfully recreated those patterns by directly stimulating the nervous system with electrical signals.
In 2016, Bensmaia worked with partners at the University of Pittsburgh to develop the first ever robotic prosthetic device that gave realistic touch feedback to a human patient who could control its arm and hand with his thoughts. The device enabled a 28-year-old man who was paralyzed from the chest down to distinguish between touches on individual fingers and the palm of a robotic hand. Later that fall, the patient used the arm to greet President Barack Obama at a White House event.
Bensmaia received a Research Program Award (R35) from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in 2022 to further support this neuroprosthetics work. More recently, he began expanding the application of these concepts, rooted in the belief that the sense of touch is a fundamental part of what makes us human.
Bensmaia received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1995. As an undergraduate studying computer engineering and cognitive science, he wanted to be a musician. He was an accomplished pianist, but his parents, both academics, convinced him to apply to graduate school. He was accepted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he worked in a psychology laboratory studying the sense of touch. He earned a PhD in cognitive psychology with a minor in neurobiology from UNC in 2003, then worked as a postdoctoral fellow and associate research scientist at the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University from 2003 to 2009.
He joined the University of Chicago faculty as an assistant professor in 2009, receiving an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation in 2011 and the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Biological Sciences Division in 2015. He was selected as a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, and he was named the James and Karen Frank Family Professor at UChicago in 2019.
Editor’s note: This story was adapted from materials provided by the University of Chicago Medicine.
