Directors' Message

Dear ICONs for Health,

With the new academic year now in motion, we want to take a moment to share key updates, upcoming events, and new initiatives happening at ICON-Health.

Inaugural ICON-Health Eminent Scholar Seminar Series

We are honored to host Herman Pontzer, PhD, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health at Duke Global Health Institute, on September 21–22.  Dr. Pontzer’s visit is sponsored in partnership with the FSU Department of Anthropology.  See below for the list of events in this series:

• ICON-Health Faculty Sessions with Dr. Pontzer | September 21, Morning, FSU College of Medicine: Based on interest, we will be setting-up meetings/sessions for ICON-Health faculty members to meet with Dr. Herman Pontzer on the morning of September 21. If you are interested in attending one of these sessions, please complete our quick, 2-question survey HERE to help us plan.
• Research Seminar Featuring Dr. Herman Pontzer, Co-Hosted with FSU Department of Anthropology | September 21, 3:30 PM, Moore Auditorium: Click HERE to register and add to your calendar!
  • Extra Credit for Students? If you are interested in offering extra credit to your students who attend, please reply to this email to let us know how we can support you with this.
• Meet-the-Author Event | September 21, Evening: A special gathering for members of our ICON-Health Book Club!  Details will be sent out to book club members directly.  If you’d still like to join, sign up HERE. 

Book Club Information: In anticipation of Dr. Pontzer’s visit, we have launched a book club.  We are reading Dr. Pontzer’s book Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us. We hope you’ll join us - this book is written to be enjoyed by specialists and non-specialists alike.  If you’d like to purchase your own copy, here are a few retailer links: Amazon; Audible.

2026 Discovery Days Event | October 20 | 12-3:30 PM | Dunlap Champions Club We are so excited for this year’s Discovery Days event: Blurry Lines: When Does Nutrition Become Medicine?   We hope you’ll join us! Click HERE to register and add to your calendar!

ICON-Health Biomarker Core Service Facility Looking ahead, our Biomarker Core Service Facility is set to open in 2027 in the new FSU Academic Health Center. Our sincere thanks go to all ICON-Health members who self-nominated to serve on the facility's advisory committee; your willingness to help shape this resource from the outset speaks to the collaborative spirit that defines our institute. Beginning this fall, we will start introducing the Core and raising awareness of its capabilities across the FSU community, so investigators can plan ahead and consider how the facility might fit into their research programs. We anticipate that the Core will become a valuable resource for advancing research that studies nutrition as a biological variable at the cellular level.  It will give investigators across disciplines the means to measure, comprehensively, the effects of nutrients on nutrient-responsive cellular biomarkers of health and disease, and to incorporate nutrition into study design, analysis, and interpretation in ways that have not previously been practical or scalable.

New Campus-Wide T32 Training Initiative We are also excited to announce a new ICON-Health initiative to develop a campus-wide T32 training grant in multidisciplinary nutrition research, supporting both pre-doctoral and post-doctoral trainees. Nutrition sits at the intersection of nearly every question FSU asks about human health and well-being, and we intend for this program to reflect that breadth. We hope that many graduate programs will be interested in participating, spanning the physical, life, social, and health sciences as well as the humanities, so that trainees learn to approach nutrition from the molecular through the societal and cultural scales. If you are interested in helping design this program and would like to serve on the steering committee, please self-nominate HERE.

Thank you for your continued engagement and dedication to advancing research at ICON-Health.

Warm regards,