Published 2.6.25 After more than a century of research, the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s remains a mystery. Dr. Karl Herrup has made a career of trying to unravel that mystery. For decades, the leading theory has been that abnormal amyloid plaques in the brain are the central cause of the disease. On this episode of STEM-Talk — available now — Herrup shares his view that the amyloid cascade hypothesis is not only flawed but also could be holding back research for a cure. “At root, the problem stems from trying to make a complicated disease simple,” Herrup says. “At a more… Read More

Published 1.29.25 Pensacola attorney H. Wesley “Wes” Reeder has joined the Board of Directors for the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Reeder is president and shareholder for Emmanuel Sheppard & Condon. Dr. Morley Stone, IHMC’s chief executive officer, said Reeder’s expertise and experience will be a great asset in continuing to move the Institute forward. “IHMC is very fortunate to have Wes join our board of directors,” Stone says. “His personal and professional experience — from his U.S. Navy service to his legal career — will be an incredibly valuable resource for us. We all look forward… Read More

Published 1.23.25 Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is recruiting people 60 years and older for a seven-month trial to better understand the health benefits of exercise. Results of the trial are aimed toward personalizing exercise prescription to maximize the health benefits attained for each older adult. This clinical trial — supported by a National Institutes of Health award to Dr. Marcas Bamman — is a collaboration among IHMC, the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and the University of Florida. Recruitment of 250 participants is under way in both Pensacola and Oklahoma City. Learn more and complete the prescreening process… Read More

Published 1.16.25 Frank Butler has saved the lives of countless U.S. military servicemembers due in large part to something he saw as a college sophomore. As a Georgia Institute of Technology student on a Navy ROTC scholarship, Butler was in Virginia in 1969 learning about different aspects of Navy careers. A helicopter full of Navy SEALs flew over the group of students that included Butler. They dropped from that helicopter over water and staged a demonstration of using explosives to clear a beach for an amphibious assault, “just as they had done in World War II,” he says. “I was… Read More

Published 1.23.25 Cultivating innovation is in the DNA of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. The Takeoff: 2024 Northwest Florida Pitch Day was another opportunity for the partnership between IHMC and Space Florida to yield fruitful results in the name of innovation. Three IHMC Research Projects were featured at The Takeoff, a forum for regional startups and researchers to share their stories in front of venture capital and investment firms. Dr. Morley Stone, IHMC’s Chief Executive Officer, said The Takeoff  “showcased IHMC’s growing commercialization interests and Florida’s prominence as a hub for cutting-edge technology, investment, and entrepreneurship, reinforcing… Read More

Published 1.10.25 Dr. Pascal Lee had led more than 30 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic to gain knowledge that might be helpful for a greater adventure — Mars. Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, and NASA Ames Research Center, brings his vision for reaching this next, lofty goal to the first Evening Lecture of 2025 hosted by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. His talk, “Moon to Mars: Our Amazing Human Exploration Future Ahead,” begins at 6 p.m. on Jan. 30 in the Institute’s classroom at 40 S. Alcaniz St., in downtown… Read More

Published 1.8.25 Science Saturdays are back and ready to heat up young scientific minds in 2025. These 90-minute educational enrichment sessions are a cornerstone of community outreach at Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Topics for the 2025 season include photo editing, roller coasters, human performance, and more. The sessions are aimed at students in grades 3-7 and are free to attend thanks to the support of community partners. In the series’ 16 years, nearly 5,600 students have attended and explored their interest in a wide array of science and technology topics, according to Dr. Ursula Schwuttke, director… Read More

Published 12.19.24 The robotics team at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition recently took one of their exoskeletons for a test drive in the outside world. A video of the first out-of-lab test of IHMC’s Eva exoskeleton conducted in late Fall 2024 is now available. Eva is designed to help those who work in hazardous environments and need to carry heavy personal protective equipment. This collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, explores how wearable robotic systems can be incorporated into nuclear remediation projects. The collaboration is aimed at addressing the healthspan issues of… Read More

Published 12.2.24 Hans Van Dongen knew when he majored in astrophysics, it would not likely be his career. It was the diversity and rigor of scientific disciplines he would study in pursuit of that degree at Leiden University in the Netherlands that appealed to him. “When you signed up for astrophysics they tell you, ‘you are not going to be an astrophysicist, but you will be able to do pretty much anything else that you put your mind to because you have learned all of these different skills.’ And that is exactly what happened. I learned a ton of all… Read More

Published 11.20.24 After more than 34 years under the leadership of founder Dr. Ken Ford, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition will see a new senior leadership team take the reins. Ford will step into an emeritus role as of January 2025. The announcement was made in November 2024. Under Ford’s leadership, IHMC was built from a small office inside the University of West Florida into an independent research entity with an international reputation for excellence and innovation. The Institute focuses on a broad range of topics related to amplifying and extending human capabilities through three primary research… Read More

Published 11.15.24 The Ocala community has long supported IHMC. But to many, the research that goes on there is a bit of a mystery. Ocala’s campus is home to computer scientists, engineers, and linguists engaged in research spanning machine learning, natural language understanding, natural language understanding for social cybersecurity, and speech analysis for physiological state determination. The inaugural Ocala Research Showcase was an open house-style event highlighting IHMC scientists and sharing the impact their research can have in artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics and exoskeletons, and healthspan, resilience, and performance. Research Scientist Dr. Ian Perera led the coordination of… Read More

Published 10.30.24 IHMC’s podcast STEM-Talk has earned another accolade, winning the bronze award in the third Annual Signal Awards for best General Health and Wellness podcast. Dr. Ken Ford, IHMC’s co-founder and CEO, co-hosts the podcast with colleagues from IHMC, including Drs. Dawn Kernagis, Marcas Bamman, and Tommy Wood. The episode featured by the Signal Award is Episode 162 with Dr. Marc Hamilton, an international expert in muscle physiology and professor at the University of Houston. He has published pioneering work on the soleus push-up, a potent physiological method which Marc discovered having the ability to elevate metabolism for hours,… Read More

Published 10.28.24 Dr. Rudy Tanzi is best known for co-discovering all three familial early onset Alzheimer’s genes — discoveries that have expanded what we know about the disease, how we might counter its effects, and the speed with which drug therapies can be brought to market. He has co-written two books with Deepak Chopra, , “Super Brain” and “The Healing Self,” and is one of the top 50 most cited neuroscientists in the world. He also plays keyboards in the studio for Aerosmith and its guitar player Joe Perry. A well-rounded career to be certain. Tanzi is the director of… Read More

Published 10.01.24 Dr. Marcas Bamman has received a $7.7 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a clinical trial to determine how people age 60 and older attain the health benefits of exercise. Bamman is a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) who leads the Institute’s Healthspan, Resilience, and Performance team. This new project is called “Multidimensional Predictive Modeling to Understand Mechanisms of Exercise Response Heterogeneity in Older Adults.”  It is a collaboration with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and the University of Florida. “This type of research is what the new… Read More

Published 9.23.24 Dr. Anurag Singh has spent his career using research to unlock a better treatment path for the chronic diseases that dominated his early medical practice. “I felt I was blindly treating the symptomology of these chronic diseases (cancer, diabetes), and it gave rise to the question, ‘What if we could intervene earlier?’” Singh says. The journey to answer that question led him to Nestle Health Science and ultimately to his role as chief medical officer at Timeline Nutrition, a Swiss life-science company focused on improving mitochondrial and cellular health. Singh, who has a medical degree in internal medicine… Read More

Published: 9.5.24 Few people know as much about inflammation and neuroscience as Dr. Kevin Tracey does. So how does he explain what inflammation — whose identification can be traced to the time of Galen — means to human health? “Every year, 60 million people die on Earth,” he says. “Two-thirds of them — 40 million people — die of a disease caused or made worse by inflammation.” That’s why he sees inflammation as “the single major threat to long healthspan because it contributes to the major killers and major unsolved diseases on the planet.” In the latest episode of STEM-Talk, available now… Read More

Published: 9.3.24 The Evening Lecture series for Fall 2024 at Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) features a heavy focus on human performance, workplace culture and related topics. The sessions begin in Pensacola on Sept. 19, 2024, with Sarah Robb O’Hagan, the chief executive officer of EXOS, a coaching company focused on human performance utilizing a team of fitness specialists, performance coaches, physical therapists, dietitians, and psychologists to maximize team performance. She led the reinvention and turnaround of Gatorade as its global president, the digital transformation of Equinox Fitness Clubs as its President and the transformation of Flywheel… Read More

Published 8.22.24 Science Saturdays are back and ready to turn on new scientific minds this school year. These 90-minute educational enrichment sessions are a cornerstone piece of community outreach at Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Topics in 2024 will include 3D printing, bottle rockets, secret codes, and more. The sessions are free to the families who attend, thanks to the support of community partners. For more than 17 years now, Science Saturday has inspired students in grades 3-7 in both Pensacola and on the Institute’s Ocala campus. In the 2023-2024 school year, more than 300 students attended… Read More

Published 8.9.24 Is AI at its peak or is it just getting warmed up? That’s just one of the questions Dr. Ken Ford, IHMC’s CEO and Founder weighs in on in this “Ask Me Anything” episode of STEM-Talk available now wherever you listen to podcasts. In this episode, Ken, who is Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, shares his thoughts on AI given the recent developments in the field, particular in the realm of Generative AI, with programs like Chat GPT becoming a household name in the last year. “(Large Language Models) as they have been… Read More

Published 7.26.24 Students have long had a home at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. This summer’s student collaborators included cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy participating in the Cadet Summer Research Program. This program offers opportunities for cadets to get out of the classroom and experience real-world research and development that align with their majors, interests, and potentially their career fields. Senior Research Scientist Dr. Kevin Gluck, who worked with the students, says that although they won’t all pursue science or engineering in the Air Force, it is certain research and development will play a role… Read More