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<http://nytimes.com>
Sliman Bensmaia, Who Enabled Prosthetic Limbs to Feel, Dies at 49
Clay Risen

His work in the neuroscience of touch led to devices that allow amputees
and quadriplegics not just to move about the world but also to sense temperature and pressure.

Aug. 22, 2023

Sliman Bensmaia, whose pioneering work on the neuroscience of touch opened doors for amputees and people with quadriplegia, allowing them not just to grasp a cup of coffee, for example, but to feel its heat and know just how
much pressure to apply to hold it tightly, died on Aug. 11 at his home in Chicago. He was 49.

His death was confirmed by the University of Chicago, where he was a
professor in its department of organismal biology and anatomy. No cause
was given.

Dr. Bensmaia was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the
2000s when the Defense Department, faced with a mounting number of wounded veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, committed $100 million to prosthetics research.

Scientists were making enormous strides in the field of brain-controlled prosthetics, but giving users of such devices a sense of touch was still largely uncharted territory. Patients could not actually feel what they
were doing: whether a material was rough or smooth, if it was moving or
stable, even where their limb was in space.

Dr. Bensmaia (pronounced bens-MAY-ah) saw his task as taking the next
step: understanding how the brain receives and processes information
through touch, which in turn could allow prosthetics to perform more akin
to an organic limb.

"Touch is so rich, so multidimensional," he told Discover magazine in
2016. "There's a lot we do understand, but there's still a lot we don't
know."

Much of his basic research involved rhesus monkeys, whose neural systems closely resemble those of humans.

He and his team would connect electrodes to areas of the monkeys' brains,
poke spots on their hands and then analyze where the brains received that sensory information, as well as how the animals reacted. They then used electrodes to simulate those pokes, in an attempt to mimic the experience.

"When you imagine moving your arm, that part of the brain is still active,
but nothing happens due to the lost connection," he told the magazine
Wireless Design and Development in 2014. "The idea behind the project was
to stick electrodes in the brain and stimulate it directly to produce some percepts of touch to better control the modular limb."

Most scientists focus their labs on either pure or applied research. Dr. Bensmaia's group - some two dozen undergraduates, grad students, post docs
and technicians - managed to do both. He employed neuroscientists, but
also teams of engineers and computer programmers.

"He ran his lab like a small company," David Freedman, a neurobiologist at Chicago, said in a phone interview.

Such coordination was necessary for the complicated work Dr. Bensmaia
engaged in. The sense of touch involves a wide array of finely measured
inputs - pressure, heat, movement, hardness - all of which are
communicated to the brain through some 100 billion neurons and 100
trillion synaptic connections.

"The hand, in a way, is an expression of our intelligence, our neural sophistication," he said in 2022 on a podcast with Mark Mattson, a
neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins University.

A talented pianist who played regular gigs around Chicago, Dr. Bensmaia compared the flush of inputs to a "neural symphony."

He took his research from Johns Hopkins to the University of Chicago in
2009, but continued to collaborate with his former colleagues at Hopkins,
as well as research teams at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 2016, his team and a group from the University of Pittsburgh outfitted
a 28-year-old man, Nathan Copeland, who had been paralyzed from the neck
down, with a prosthetic arm that allowed him to feel through its finger
tips.

During a visit to the lab, President Barack Obama watched Mr. Copeland in action, then gave him a fist bump.

"That is unbelievable," Mr. Obama said.

Sliman Julien Bensmaia was born on Sept. 17, 1973, in Nice, France. His parents, Reda Bensmaia and Joelle Proust, are philosophers. Sliman grew up
in France and Algeria, then moved to the United States at 15.

He studied cognitive science at the University of Virginia, with a plan to
go into music. But his parents persuaded him to pursue a doctoral degree instead, so after graduating in 1995 he enrolled in the cognitive
psychology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. in 2003.

Dr. Bensmaia was a prolific researcher; he and his colleague Stacy Lindau
had recently begun work on a bionic breast, to restore sensation to
patients after mastectomies.

In addition to his parents, Dr. Bensmaia is survived by his wife, Kerry
Ledoux; his brother, Djamel; and his children, Cecily and Maceo.

Dr. Bensmaia never lost his interest in music: He and Dr. Freedman, his colleague at Chicago, formed a band, FuzZz, and even released an album in
2013.

But it was only in the last few weeks that the two had begun talking about conducting a research project together, on the relationship between how
the brain processes visual and touch inputs.

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a
senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the
Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "American Rye: A Guide
to the Nation's Original Spirit." More about Clay Risen




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