The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has long been known for its cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. Now, the institute is expanding its horizons into human health.
The brand-new, $40 million Healthspan, Resilience, and Performance Research Complex opened last week in downtown Pensacola.
Marcas Bamman is a senior research scientist at IHMC and directs the institute's health span, resilience, and performance research practice. He said this new facility was the hub in what could become an entirely new biomedical ecosystem for the region.
"The impetus behind this building was really to enable us to study (human health) at all levels," he said, "from the smallest puzzle pieces in our body, the smallest molecules, to the whole person."
With the opening of the new facility, Bamman has space to triple the size of his team, which already includes about a dozen people. The new, three-story building is designed to foster collaboration between this group and IHMC’s wider stable of experts in the fields of robotics and intelligent systems. Bamman said it was this kind of interdisciplinary research that is the key to ongoing scientific discovery and technological innovation.
"If we want to really move science forward," he said, "we have to learn from one another all the time. The goal here is to be able to not only add value to those other two legs of the IHMC stool (robotics and intelligent systems), ... but also gain from those to really enhance the progression in the biological sciences."
Bamman shared an example of one such project that is currently underway.
"We have a program actually directed by Dr. Jeff Phillips, developing a technology for haptic gloves," he said, "meaning gloves that have thermal properties but also have sensors on the fingertips so that people can operate controls, for example, in an aircraft or in other situations where they might need to operate in a very, very cold environment without having to take the glove off."
Bamman said the research complex would fill a gap in Northwest Florida.
"I sort of like to call this region a biomedical research desert," he said "... If you look on a map, (to find) the major academic medical centers where this kind of research is happening, the closest ones, you have to go west to New Orleans and beyond, or you have to go north to Birmingham and Atlanta, or you have to go east to Gainesville. These are all 200, 250, 350 miles away."
Leaders at IHMC hope the new facility will enable them to recruit academic talent to Pensacola and expand an existing partnership with the University of West Florida.
"IHMC already offers ... a jointly supported and jointly sponsored doctoral program where people can actually earn a PhD in Intelligent Systems and Robotics," Bamman noted. "We are now in conversations with UWF about a comparable program to earn a doctorate in the health span field or in sort of the health space and this would be focused on human performance, health informatics."
Aside from its significance for research, IHMC’s new complex could also become a significant economic driver for the region.
"IHMC has brought in millions upon millions of dollars to the region from federal support, grants, and contracts support, as well as industry-sponsored support over many years," Bamman said. "We expect that to expand ... This would be on the order of tens of millions of dollars and into the hundreds of millions of dollars over time that will come into this region. It'll be an opportunity to create new jobs, recruit talent, and grow a scientific enterprise that's not been in this region at all."
