Directors' Message

Dear ICONs for Health,

This October, we invite you to join us for our Discovery Days symposium, “Blurry Lines: When Does Nutrition Become Medicine?” on October 20 at the Dunlap Champions Club in Doak Campbell Stadium. The public program begins at noon and concludes at 3:30 p.m. This year’s symposium brings together various perspectives from nutrition, neuroscience, biomedical sciences, business, and law to explore the intersections of diet, health, and medical treatment. Sessions “GLP-1: Rewiring Brain & Gut Health” and “Diet or Drugs? When, Why & How? Perspectives from Business, Law & Medicine” will lead into an audience-participation panel and a networking reception with food and refreshments. We encourage all members of our community to attend.  Faculty are strongly encouraged to bring their classes and engage students in these timely discussions. Whether nutrition is central to your work or a new area of interest, we welcome your questions and perspectives. Please click HERE to RSVP and add the symposium to your calendar.

Discovery Days will also offer a preview of an important new resource for our research community: the ICON-Health Integrated Biomarker Core, which will open in spring 2027 in the new FSU Health Building. The Core is being developed to enable all FSU investigators to include nutrition as a biological variable in their discovery, and pre-clinical research from all disciplines, as well as to inform the design of human-focused clinical trials. Our goal is to make it easier for investigators across disciplines to ask how nutritional status and biological responses to nutrients contribute to the questions they study, and to incorporate these considerations into research planning and interpretation. We will highlight the Core during the symposium’s 12:15 p.m. introduction, and we encourage you to begin considering how this shared resource could strengthen your research and create opportunities for collaboration. Thank you to the ICON-Health members who have volunteered to help guide its development. Together, Discovery Days and the Biomarker Core reflect our commitment to connecting people, disciplines, and research resources to advance nutrition and health across FSU.

We look forward to seeing you on October 20!