Sharlene N. Flesher

Papers

Total Citations

678

H-Index

About

Sharlene N. Flesher is a pioneering neuroscientist whose research sits at the intersection of neural engineering, somatosensory feedback, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Her most influential work, a 2021 study with 579 citations, demonstrated that a BCI evoking tactile sensations dramatically improves robotic arm control for individuals with tetraplegia. By supplementing vision with artificial touch, Flesher showed that users could perform more dexterous, functional movements—a breakthrough that addresses one of the field's greatest challenges: restoring naturalistic feedback in prosthetic limbs. Earlier, she tackled a critical technical hurdle in bidirectional BCIs, developing methods to eliminate electrical artifacts from intracortical microstimulation (2018, 59 citations), enabling simultaneous recording and stimulation without signal corruption. Her investigations into implicit grasp force representation (2018, 27 citations) further revealed how motor cortical activity encodes fine force control, laying groundwork for more intuitive prosthetic manipulation. Flesher also contributed to early demonstrations of high-degree-of-freedom cortical control of robotic arms (2013). Her work has been instrumental in moving BCIs from laboratory demonstrations toward clinically viable systems that restore both movement and sensation, profoundly impacting the lives of people with paralysis.